Comment by oceanplexian
3 hours ago
Yeah, great article. But it should get to the point.
The reason you need to physically remove yourself is because of the insane lunatics that blast trash music and do a dance while aggressively panhandling or screaming at you for trying to commute quitely on the train to work. A hallmark of daily life when I worked in SF and in NYC.
A great way to fix the fake problem would be to aggressively enforce the existing laws, starting with tickets, and if that doesn't work, incarceration. Apparently it's not politically correct to do that though so I guess we are all second class citizens who need to live in a low trust society where people are increasingly isolated.
Coming back to the states after traveling abroad is always astonishing. For all our wealth, it genuinely feels worse than somewhere like Brazil in many of our big cities
The Brazilian government keeps the crime contained to specific areas, where it gets extremely bad. In the US, a generalized lack of enforcement means small amounts of nuisance crime spread around.
People can’t understand you can’t have both protecting the poor and not enforcing laws against the poor at the same time
I’ve been in the Baltic countries for a few weeks. I do not see any of the behaviors you mentioned, but all the behaviors mentioned in the article.
I don’t think this is a bad music problems
> if that doesn't work, incarceration.
Sure, let’s “solve” a minor problem in the grand scheme of things with a much larger evil.
incarceration is going too far, all you need is a few enforcers with shock wands like in Demolition Man
Maniac has responded with a scornful remark!
I’d say it’s the opposite. We get non enforcement and anti enforcement because lots of people aren’t directly affected.
Different neighborhoods, work from home, private transportation to work, or—admittedly to a lesser degree—AirPod insulation.
If we were really all this together quality of life in our cities would be taken far more seriously.
Incarceration would be nuts.
> The reason you need to physically remove yourself is because of the insane lunatics that blast trash music and do a dance while aggressively panhandling or screaming at you for trying to commute quitely on the train to work.
I've lived (and commuted on public transit) for years in many metros including SF, NYC, Boston and DC and can't recall even a single such interaction.
I'm sure it happens, I'm also sure it happens far less often than your competing anecdote suggests.
Oh lord not the laws and especially not the tickets
While that does happen occasionally in SF, it's <5% of my commutes.
It's been 0% of my commutes in Seattle. Yet the NC headphones are also everywhere, including on my head.
TBF seattle is particularly bad - it's famously unfriendly compared to other cities.
Pretty sure my commute of 12 years had exactly zero aggressive panhandling (or unaggressive panhandling), yet just about every single person on it was wearing some flavour of them.
I've also just been in Japan, where nobody's commute has panhandling of any kind, and guess what, everyone there is tuning the world out with their headphones, too. Despite it being kind of verbotten to make noise on the subway, and the few conversations that were happening on it were very quiet.
I wasn't wearing mine during that trip. Because a relatively quiet space was actually pleasant for me to be in. American cities are so fucking noisy, and as a consequence, even people respectful of their surroundings tend to be loud.
Eh I don't think so. Commutes are as clean and peaceful as they can be in the Netherlands or Switzerland and people are no less buried in their phones with noise-cancelling earbuds on.
Why is this downvoted? This is correct.
People like blaming everything that is wrong in their life on lack of law enforcement against the undesirables.
It's a tale as old as time.