Ah that's sweet
Compassionate assholes aren't they?
A radical augmented reality (AR) solution to the appalling problem of tech bros having to see people less fortunate than themselves on the streets of San Francisco has been launched. CLEANR is the brainchild of SF resident Jon Adams and uses wearable tech to effectively delete undesirable people from your view. Adams explains …
"The next version will also allow the tech bros to blank out women in meetings."
and for a modest sum the premium version replaces them with ... ok, let's not go there.
Actually, all this sounds terribly do-able with current AR technology. Someone, somewhere, probably has gone there already and is about to launch.
Can I get one that blanks out people who blank out women?
I go out of my way to be helpful and inclusive to women in the workplace, if someone wants help learning to improve their position, i'm more than happy to spend my lunch hour going over the basics of coding...
Although you have to be careful....
For every clever, happy and friendly woman in the workplace, there is somewhere hiding an evil feminist waiting to pounce with a sexual harrasment claim because of something innocent.....
(I don't think all feminists are evil, just some)
"The next version will also allow the tech bros to blank out women in meetings."
I want to comment on this because this was not the first article in which I saw the "tech bro" meme surface. I know that there are far more males than females in the tech industry, but what reason there to think that the women as a group are any more compassionate about the homeless than the men - other than gender stereotypes?
Are they really all closer to Florence Nightingale than to Carly Fiorina cutting thousands and thousands of jobs while trying to purchase five more corporate jets?
Would anyone really be surprised if the women feel more threatened by street people generally, than the "tech bros"? And if the women do feel more threatened, they might well have very good reason to feel that way - even if they weren't constantly taught to think of themselves as victims always in danger of becoming ever more victimized.
He's making the point that the response of many local governments to homeless people is to nudge them to go be homeless elsewhere.
There was an incident in 2013 that drew a lot of attention in North Carolina, when city police started harassing and eventually arresting a church that tried to distribute food to the homeless - because, much like rats, they congregate where the food is. Withdraw the food and they will scatter and become someone else's problem. It only hit the news because the organisation as a church so they could start the 'wah wah persecution' thing and get a lot of sympathy in certain media circles. There may be next to know public sympathy for the homeless, but much of the US does love a good story about Christians being persecuted somehow.
There's another one brewing in Florida right now, basically a repeat of the same situation - a church in Oakland tried to distribute food, the local government decided this is in violation of zoning regulations. It's not really about religion or about zoning, it's just that influential people don't want to live in proximity to the homeless.
Policing is another approach - many US cities have laws against 'sleeping in a public place' or similar to allow the homeless to be arrested. Quickly released again, but the intent is to harass them in to leaving the area and going to a suitably derelict side of town where the sight of them will not lower property values. Some places have rather less subtle methods, like sloping or very narrow benches, benches with armrests between seats to prevent laying upon them, or buildings designed to create no sheltered alcoves. An up-market apartment building in London neglected to do this in the design stage and was caught instead using anti-homeless metal studs embedded in concrete near the doorway to make sure no-one would shelter there.
Next time you see a public bench, take a moment to look at it - there's a good chance you'll see some feature that, innocent at first glance, on further consideration seems to serve no purpose other than making it impossible for a person to lay down comfortably.
Another anti-homeless system that some places have implemented are "anti homeless sprinklers", basically a motion sensor with a timer linked to a sprinkler so that out of business hours it will start spraying water if someone stays too long in an alcove so to prevent homeless people from sleeping there. In some jurisdictions they were forced to take them down again.
Surely it would be feasible to write a Greasmonkey script to filter out such stories from all news sites - although I admit the Daily Mail would probably then render as an empty page a lot of the time (thus reducing its value as a comic satire on modern life).
If it has been done, I expect someone to post a link to it in 3... 2....
Mine's got stuck in "maximum protection" mode, so now EVERYONE gets changed into one of the many cute cartoon animals that are srupplied with the latest version.
Waiting at the bus stop yesterday, I was surprised by the regular arrival and departure of marching bands made up of cartoon monkeys in colourful uniforms, until I realised that this was an ingenious undocumented feature that even prevented me from seeing anything associated with poor people.such as public transport.
Turning all the planes in the sky into the Starship Enterprise is just a geek trip too far however in my opinion.
This could add a whole new concept to electioneering. From now on you now longer have to worry about whether Rubio, Trump or Cruz is winning: you just need to know if its the Azalea, the Shrub or the Potted Palm. Likewise for the Democrats we need only concern ourselves about the Gladioli or, in Hillary's case, the Rafflesia Arnoldii (parasitic with a smell of rotting flesh when in season).
"someone looking homeless can strip them of their Rolex, iWhatsits, Credit cards etc. and they won't even see who did it."
"Can you give me a description of the muggers, sir?"
"Why yes, one was a charming wrought iron Victorian lamp post, and the other was a terracotta planter full of begonias."
"a few bullets would be far cheaper and more permanent"
Or, radical idea... the wealthy could pay to get the homeless into shelters and educated...
I hate seeing homeless on the street, because its terrible for them to live that way, I want govermnets to build shelters for the homeless
They don't need much, go for Japan style pod hotel beds (with decent locks), shared showers, toilets, and food.
Add in somewhere to learn and maybe they can pull themselves out of poverty....
I think I've heard that proposal before.
Icon for the Neutron Bomb, mentioned in the link.
Very funny guys, and it even uses the social media bubble meme of dropping the "e" from the end of the product name ("cleaner" becomes "cleanr", instant marketing genius; here's a $150K salary!) So if the cloud service powering this real time reality distortion field goes down, is there a local backup to at least filter out the "yuck" category? :-)
I never thought anything would top the dotcom bubble for sheer ridiculousness of startup executive personalities. I'm wrong! 24 year old CEOs with way too much money make for very entertaining stories.
The product is... but the letter to the mayor and police chief... No.. http://justink.svbtle.com/open-letter-to-mayor-ed-lee-and-greg-suhr-police-chief
The mainstream press has picked up on Mr. Keller's letter and they are not being as nice as this article was.
I think that's true, but largely only by comparison with other got-rich-quick types (like Wall Street wizards).
However, while I am deeply distrustful of Facebook, I was genuinely touched to see that San Francisco General Hospital, which is where the indigent and everyone in the city goes who can't afford health care (and whose AIDS wards were the final stop for so many in the 1990's)... is now called the "Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital".
Yeah, that beats a new concert hall, or wing at a museum any day.
Respect, Zuck!
"Of course he could have just given them the sodding cash without insisting on having his name plastered all over it."
If it strokes his ego, who cares? The money's been given and if self-aggrandisement is his motivation it doesn't stop it being used where it's needed. You get to laugh at his ego, and people get medical care. Win.
Both Jon Adams and Justin Keller are clearly in need of abdominal fenestrative surgery , so that they can still see where they are going while their heads are so far up their own arses.
There but for the grace of god/luck/karma etc go I.
Let's hope they get a taste of being homeless and hungry some day and experience 'don't care in the community'.
Is this actually real? What next Brownr or Blackr? Seriously, as a society is this what we are reduced to?
This is one of the most appalling things I have ever seen.
I was actually homeless in my youth and I didn't beg (though I knew people that did and they made a nice amount of money) but at the end of the day this is disgusting. Here's a tip if you ever end up on the streets, don't sleep on concrete, cardboard stops you being ridiculously cold.
Sigh. Mr Justin Keller, a "Tech Bro" of ill repute, wrote a letter wherein he called the homeless and other street folk riff raff and wondered why they cannot somehow be gotten rid of so people like himself, who worked hard and got an education, do not have to see them. The article describes a satirical tech solution to the poor Tech Bro Keller's problem. So No, it isn't real. Its highly critical of tech bros like Justin Keller.
At least, I "Hope" its satirical and critical and not just another asshole tech bro.
I should think it's obviously intended as a satirical attack on the insensitive people who are worried about how the homeless look to them, instead of the problems the homeless are facing.
Not as a serious way of making money off this insensitivity.
After all, the main reason why people are dismayed selfishly at seeing the homeless about is that they feel they present a risk - the odd one might be an aggressive panhandler or worse. So the last thing one would want is to have one's vision of potential hazards obstructed.
As for Mr. Keller, I read his letter and it was appalling. I tried to go to his startup's (commando.io) website, and got a bad link. I think the website was probably being DDoS'd into the dust at the time, by a line of hackers stretching from SF to Palo Alto.
Can't say I feel too bad about that.
have an upvote, you've hit this squarely on the head. When I attended school in Chicago, there was a homeless guy that hung around the campus. Turns out he had an education, had a good job at one time. According to a friend who tended a nearby bar, he also made some good cash living on the streets, he used to trade in his coins for cash at the bar...
... is that the techno-twats paying ~US$4500/month rent[0] for one of 4 flats in a 4-story Victorian dump, instead of actually PURCHASING[1] a house further down the peninsula for far less (and almost zero commute), are driving people into the streets.
And here I thought techies were supposed to be logical.
[0] Throwing money away.
[1] Putting money into your retirement account.
"You don't know how the economy works, do you?"
Why yes, yes I do.
Thus my point ... techno-twats throwing money away on renting a dump, when they could actually be purchasing a decent home instead.
As a side-note, where, exactly, do the techno-twats think that the poverty-line people who provide all the essential services (which the techno-twats claim to enjoy) are going to live? Nevada? That's a hell of a commute on a minimum wage salary ...
Too many of us are already running this product in our own heads. In the UK, there's a fairly long-running ad campaign by one of the big charities that displays a normal street scene (with a normal homeless youth in a corner somewhere) and then on the following page has an ad with the line "Did you see John?".
What we need is the inverse product. Happily, this almost certainly already exists. (That is, it's almost certainly already in use by the armed forces somewhere.) It is software that analyses a scene and spots homeless people (terrorists) in doorways and highlights them to make their plight (threat) more visible to the casual observer (soldier). Sadly, if you released such a product then you'd probably be accused of providing something that is useful to terrorists in an urban environment.
What algorithm does it use to analyse 'homeless beggars' from, say, Apple employees or harassed Oracle minions desperately seeking refuge from the deluge of dissatisfied end users? For example, I would hate to visit the new Apple Campus, only to be greeted by a talking shrub.
As someone who's been in SF for a somewhat long time - 15 years - my personal observation is that this latest bubble has had a far worse impact than the previous 2 in terms of pushing people onto the streets.
There have always been homeless here, but the process has gotten turbocharged in the last few years. The homeless cantons are spreading faster than Kardashian sex videos; they now take up literal square blocks in the 13th street/tunnel avenue area. And we're not just talking old people or runaway kids, there appear to be entire families out there.
Stock market: keep up the good work. Pop some unicorpses so we start drifting to normal again.
Hmm, hiding desperate people from you view is not the safest idea but then again wearers must already be short sighted to even consider wearing them or thinking them funny.
Neglecting your society is always a much more expensive option than having a support infrastructure, especially because if left unchecked it historically means revolution.
Not sure if satirical take on satire.
Serious take on satire.
Or Satirical take on serious.
I'm thinking Serious take on Satire? If it's satirical take on satire author needs to improve their satire.
Oh the word in bold at the start says satire, for some reason I tend to ignore such things. So it is satire of satire then or satire to reinforce satire? I don't think it works...
... that the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett predicted this.
In 1990.
It's in a short story, #ifdefDEBUG + "world/enough" + "time", about people using VR to strategically edit the world around them. Don't like black people, or ugly people, or poor people? Change them!
It's also one of the first applications I thought of, when Google Glass came out. I still think it's inevitable.
Considering San Francisco is one of the most liberal cities in the US the city government has done SFA about mental health issues, substance abuse and homelessness in 40 year in my experience of traveling and working there. These issues seems to have become a part of the furniture, that like most US cities, just becomes invisible as people learn not to go to places and not to see stuff. There is a enormous number of people who as civilians help out and for most it is a real thing and for some it is a sort of good-person-kudos tourism trip. But there is a political and cultural acceptance that the unfortunate are the victims of the system, part of the Hobbesian contract and to some extent a warning and an element of social control.
It us just that SF tolerates and does not harass, move on and ghettoize in the way that they do where Justin comes from. And there will never be a disruptive tech solution because there is no place to insert a profit taking layer.
Unfortunately, there was three separate incidents and countless times that we were approached for money and harassed
There was three separate incidents? What a woeful indictment of whatever "education" system this scrote wiggled through?
The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. Assuming, as seems reasonable from the article, that he's a septic tank: It is extraordinarily difficult to get through the US eduction system without some rudimentary understanding of (aspects of) the constitution, or indeed (smaller aspects of) the philosophy behind it.
Given that he managed it, he's either extremely "precious", or home-schooled, or both. We can apportion blame appopriately.
"[1] I want to apologize for using the term riff raff. It was insensitive and counterproductive."
Oh no, that was one of the - few - well phrased parts of the articles. Don't apologise for the terms you used - apologise for meaning what you meant to say!
If something like this was released, I'd keep some popcorn on standby for the inevitable first hacking and watching its wearers running around screaming about the end of the world as rain gets replaced with blood or people get replaced with Daleks (or some other alien)...