Honest question why are you blaming the homeless for fucking up things for the rest of us? In my experience the rich are far more guilty (as a generalized group) of fucking things up for me.
The rich have polluted the planet, raised the global temperature up a whole degree. The damage is that now I can’t go outside in late summer, if it doesn’t rain the week before, because the air is poisoned by soot from forest fires. The rich are the reason I couldn’t afford a place to rent in San Francisco, their speculative housing investment and gentrification raised the marked rate so much that a working class person from one of the richest country in the world couldn’t afford to live there. The rich are the reason—unless you are one of them—that you are not making significantly more money from your current job, they consistently take away from your contribution to the wealth you generate in your current job without contributing anything of value.
> The rich are the reason—unless you are one of them—that you are not making significantly more money from your current job
Actually, for a significant part of Bay Area - anybody who is working in a startup or a company that has been a startup (including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.) "the rich" are the reason they have a job and a salary with which they can afford not being homeless. Who do you think makes up VC capital from which startup investments are made? I don't idealize rich people - as a whole, they have the same percent of assholes and criminals as any other group, and as people with many resources their assholery has an outsized impact sometimes - but claiming "the rich are the reason" for all problems and without them we'd all be paid tons of money of of somewhere magic - is just sheer idiocy. Sorry, I lived in a country where (almost) nobody was rich, at least legally - and it was shitty. I do not recommend it to anybody.
I lived in a country where almost nobody was rich and it was fine. Then in the nineteens regonomics happened national resources were privatized and we had millionaires popping up until they almost literlly bankrupted the nation in the great recession of 2008.
Sorry but in my experience nothing ever good comes out of K shaped economy. I have a good reason to be salty towards the rich. I know that currently they are paying my salaries, but I am also aware that I am contributing more towards the wealth they are retrieving then I am. So strictly speaking I don’t need them. But even so, I would be fine if my entire industry would collapse and would leave me unemployed if it meant that the wealth the rich folks are accumulating at record pace would be distributed towards the working classes of every nation. I would rather make minimum wage in a world where that was the norm then to be taken advantage of by a wealthy class who consistently adds to their own wealth while the rest either stays the same or gets poorer.
> up until they almost literlly bankrupted the nation in the great recession of 2008
Iceland I guess? If you like what you've got, don't try real actual socialism. Believe me, it sucks. You'd regret it.
> I have a good reason to be salty towards the rich
If my guess is correct, you experience is an unique result of a very bad situation which was manufactured by some dirty politicians, some PhD'ed idiots and some greedy bastards (see my comment about the assholes above). That doesn't mean everybody who is rich is a bastard. Having money is a wrong marker, and your saltiness is way off target.
> it meant that the wealth the rich folks are accumulating at record pace would be distributed
That never ever happens. I mean, even if it happened it would amount to tiny crumbs for you ("you livelihood and all you've done for living are gone and you have no means to support you family or procure food, but here's your check for $275, enjoy it!") - you can't both whine about "tiny number of people owning stuff" and expect taking their stuff would make you rich - "tiny number" means you only get a tiny part of it. Arithmetics is a cruel science.
But in fact there's no "distribution" ever possible. Never happened, never will. There's only destruction and desolation. It is possible to target Bill Gates's wealth and destroy it. Shut down Microsoft, make all its workers unemployed, blow up the campuses and wipe out the backups. Can be done. You won't be even $275 richer from that though. Nothing will be "distributed", just destroyed. This is the only way it has ever worked or can work. Revolutions do not make anyone richer, but they do make a lot of people starve and die.
> I would rather make minimum wage in a world where that was the norm
No you wouldn't. I lived in that world, and I haven't seen any single person who after experiencing both wanted to remain in the minimum wage world. Millions wanted to move out and took extraordinary efforts - often risking their lives - to do it. Remember the Berlin wall? Why do you think they needed the wall - is it to hold out the West Germans itching to experience the blessings of the East German minimal wage? How many South Koreans you think want to move to North Korea to enjoy the guaranteed rice rations?
> a world where that was the norm then to be taken advantage of by a wealthy class who consistently adds to their own wealth while the rest either stays the same or gets poorer.
But that's not true. The rest doesn't get poorer - in fact, the number of people living in poverty is declining steadily. Yes, I know you had a bad experience in 2008, but if you're willing to have a broader look you can easily see it: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
Rich people aren't tipping over trashcans or shitting on my sidewalk.
> raised the global temperature up a whole degree
This doesn't actually affect you, you've just been brainwashed into thinking it's the most important thing ever. Emissions are going down in all of the most highly developed countries. As technology improves, this will improve as well. You're complaining about progress that has lifted billions of people out of squalor to having powerful computers in their pockets and being able to transport goods across the globe.
> The damage is that now I can’t go outside in late summer, if it doesn’t rain the week before, because the air is poisoned by soot from forest fires.
Maybe they should do some forest management with the billions in taxes they take every year, instead of giving it to street-shitting, drugged-out hobos.
> The rich are the reason I couldn’t afford a place to rent in San Francisco, their speculative housing investment and gentrification raised the marked rate so much that a working class person from one of the richest country in the world couldn’t afford to live there.
When demand goes up, and supply doesn't, the price goes up. This isn't rich people's fault, it's basic supply and demand.
> The rich are the reason—unless you are one of them—that you are not making significantly more money from your current job, they consistently take away from your contribution to the wealth you generate in your current job without contributing anything of value.
They provide you with a job. You are free to start your own business. Rich people can't stop you.
> Rich people aren't tipping over trashcans or shitting on my sidewalk.
Are you seriously equating globally warming the planet with littering? Yes the latter is annoying but the former is literally killing a significant number of people around the world every day. You can’t blame the fires solely on bad forest management. Yes forests in California could (and should) be managed better, but with the climate disaster fueling them I think those effort would be futile.
> They provide you with a job. You are free to start your own business. Rich people can't stop you.
Again, seriously? Reality check, if this were an actual option more people would do it. How many people get rich (or are able to at least make a living) after starting a business from a working wage? In the real world, normal folks can’t afford to start a business, and even if we could, the risk of failure is too great for us to risk loosing everything and ending up in debt for it.
> if this were an actual option more people would do it.
How much more? US has over 31M small businesses. How many do you need to conclude it's an option? 99.9% of businesses in the US are small businesses (obviously, since you only need one person to make a small business and 100K persons to make a Walmart). If normal folks can't afford it, who are all those? I know several people having businesses, in what way they are not "normal"? Not all of them are rich (in fact, most of them aren't, most are making a good living, some better than others, but none I know are billionaires so far) but how this is not normal? I think your picture here is very skewed.
I agree that the scale of damage is greater. I just caution anyone grouping people based on belonging to a category. Being rich doesn’t mean you polluted more than others. Al Gore is rich, but he was kind of focused on that issue.
So for every 100 rich folks that have screwed you over you have an Al Gore that doesn’t. Please have the perspective also that for every homeless person that mugs someone you heard of, there are thousands that wouldn’t even think of doing anything even close to that.
Seriously? Do you have reason to be afraid of the homeless or are you simply experiencing prejudice? If the former is the case I recommend you move somewhere where there are fewer homeless.
But this dichotomy of homeless vs. the rich is really silly. You have less to fear around the rich because they are rich, the homeless might be in a desperate situation and behave accordingly, or as put in the Movie Parasite:
> Ki-taek: They are rich but still nice.
> Chung-sook: They are nice because they are rich.
The danger the rich pose is not something they do to you as you are walking home. It is something they do to the planet (like spilling oil or emitting massive amount of carbon), what they do through the legal system (like evict you), or even just fire you, paying you unfairly, stealing from or influencing your government, etc.
My last interaction with a homeless person, in the park next to my house: he yelled at me, and talked about grabbing his hatchet... while I was walking with my pregnant wife. So yes, I a have a reason to fear for my families safety around the homeless.
I live and work in the Portland, OR area. Homelessness is a real problem here, and they are moving out of the city into the suburbs.
The rich have polluted the planet, raised the global temperature up a whole degree. The damage is that now I can’t go outside in late summer, if it doesn’t rain the week before, because the air is poisoned by soot from forest fires. The rich are the reason I couldn’t afford a place to rent in San Francisco, their speculative housing investment and gentrification raised the marked rate so much that a working class person from one of the richest country in the world couldn’t afford to live there. The rich are the reason—unless you are one of them—that you are not making significantly more money from your current job, they consistently take away from your contribution to the wealth you generate in your current job without contributing anything of value.