I saw a young, able-bodied guy begging today at a major intersection with the sign, “Hungry Vegan”. Don’t know how that’s working out for him. Maybe he’s working the irony angle.
At least he’s not at the other big intersection that has the guy without a nose and (on the other side of the crossroad) the guy with the horribly bent lower leg. Tough competition.
I have yet to find a beggar that will actually take food. There may be some but 99.9% of them a nothing but lazy, useless, thieves.
Back about 20 years ago, I was in the hospital up in San Francisco and my wife and daughter were visiting. They went to TGI Friday’s for dinner near Fisherman’s Wharf. As they left the restaurant, there was a blind man in a wheelchair begging. As they walked away, some teenaged kids came out of the restaurant and one reached into the guy’s bowl of money. He took some and they started to walk away. The beggar threw off his dark glasses, jumped out of the wheelchair and took off after the kids.
True story.
I know after observing panhandlers in Chicago that the good ones know their territory very well. They do better market research than the store owners, who come and go whenever the styles change while the beggars just write new signs. He’s probably appealing to his target Altruists. Considering how much they spend at health food stores, it might be a good strategy.
Doesn’t anyone else find it odd that we are inundated at every turn with people begging for money?
I realize there are multiple factors at play in this situation, but somewhere along the way we have lost track of something important to the idea of people going about their daily lives without being subjected to an endless gauntlet of con men and women at every stop light.
There was just an article online the other day about Hawaii and the wave of homeless beach dwellers that threatens to overwhelm it’s social services, as well as upsetting the tourists vital to their economy.
Last year I was told by my daughter not to take my grandson to his favorite playground in Santa Monica too early because the homeless encampment there were threatening if too much noise woke them up early, I.e., before noon.
I find a country in which every loony’s right to be as looney as they desire trumps any ordinary citizen’s right to take a child to the playground safely to be a society in serious trouble.
Wow. Your country is so broken that you have hordes of homeless people trying to survive. Your solution: Blame them.
Not at all pretty folks.
I honestly haven’t seen as many professional beggars on certain streetcorners as I used to do – but then, I am usually not out and about as frequently and regularly as I was when I worked for other people.
The exception is the couple of intersections immediately adjacent to a suburban bus station which is right across from a couple of big shopping centers/malls. Always a couple of scruffy looking people there, but that’s about the only place.
They are common in Seattle. Or used to be when I was there fairly often. Santa Monica also has lots. They go where they are welcome, like San Francisco but I’m not up to date on San Francisco.
No, Pengun. It means this is a very generous and tolerant society. People put up with some degree of parasitism as long as the parasites aren’t too dangerous or intrusive, and around here they are not. A lot of these guys look to be seasonal migrants who live on handouts and SS disability payments and follow the warm weather. They are around in large part because the rest of us are subsidizing them, not because there is something broken in our society. I don’t think we should subsidize them, and I won’t give any handouts to vegan sign guy, but it should be clear to anyone with half a clue that their presence reflects on Americans’ good rather than bad qualities. Of course you don’t get that.
A friend on mine, a Canadian architect, is currently out of work. She’s burned through her savings and is living in a women’s shelter in Toronto. We exchange emails pretty regularly. Her life is bit Charles Dickens lately. Her car was recently stolen. It was found by the police about week later, but it was a Canadian Holiday so the police, who were supposed to impound the car so that whoever had stolen it no longer had access, instead left it there. The paperwork they filed was falsified saying she’d forgotten where she left it. Two days later it was gone again.
Her keys and cash had been stolen from her bags, so she assumes it was someone in the shelter, probably the transgender drug addict who bunks in her room. Her car was found again, she had new locks installed, but many of her personal effects were stolen, including professional portfolio, jewelry, iPad, bank account statements, credit cards, etc.
Normally, I would hold this person accountable for their bad behavior. But with hordes of broken people living in shelters in the broken Land of Canada, I know not to blame them for their actions. I blame the broken society of Canada. What horrible people Canadians are, and what a horrible country it is who make transgender drug addicts behave that way.
Several years ago their was a resident troll at another site I went to for conversation who called him/her/itself “Kodiak”, and claimed to be French.
His comments were, typically for the kind of sophomoric boobs who think their every brain fart is a new discovery similar to one of Newton’s laws, the same sort of childish insults and sarcasm that the fish bird deposits here.
Unfortunately, it was common for other posters to begin arguing with this troll, who never addressed any subject honestly, nor did it ever make any serious argument, or even comment, instead relying on the kind of collegiate snottery that was dynamite at the pub with the other “cool” kids from the Philosophy 101 class they were pretending to take.
Someone at the site finally tracked this bozo to an IP at a college in Britain, while other knowledgeable people who were versed in French began to note its many misuses of the language, and misinterpretations of common French cultural attitudes and practices. Once called out for these errors, the brave Sir Kodiak bravely ran away, and was’t heard from again.
So, to reiterate what I’ve previously said about our local boob here, he’s not what he claims to be, she’s clearly a uneducated sophomore pretending to be a knowledgeable adult, and it has no intellectual credibility or moral standing which would require any notice whatsoever to be taken of it’s pathetic attempts at humor, or childish insults.
It is completely similar to any young child who knows if it makes the same annoying noise enough times, some exasperated adult will finally pay it some attention, if only to tell it to be quiet.
Don’t bother.
Give him an Arby’s gift card.
You guys are funny. My IP is right now 216.113.206.157. That will change as it’s a dynamic address.
Traceroute, or the windose equivalent should give you a useful idea as to where I am. Vancouver Island as always.
Anyhoo, as an old man, I find your confusion amusing. I’m almost flattered that you would write so much about me, but I know you have nothing better to do.