A San Francisco library is turning off Wi-Fi at night to keep people without housing from using it
A San Francisco library is turning off Wi-Fi at night to keep people without housing from using it
Neighbors argued the move would reduce crime.
You're viewing a single thread.
Publicly funded but not for the public.
And before anyone makes a comment about the unhoused probably not paying taxes ... neither do any of the children or retirees who use the service every single day of the year.
We've pretty much just abandoned any concept of citizenship or civic responsibility...
getting a "protect my property value" vibes from this policy. Governing systems should focus first on lifting up our most vulnerable, and people selling houses just isnt it.
Yeah, what the fuck are we paying taxes for if not to help those who aren’t or can’t?
It's only getting turned off at night, not completely disallowing them from using it. I don't see what the problem is. I can't go and take out a book at 1am, I shouldn't also be allowed to use their WiFi.
you could check out an ebook using their services if you had access to wifi
I live in a rural area without broadband access. Any quality broadband access. During the pandemic, kids sat in their parents' cars (typically after they got home from work) to do their remote-learning homework in front of the public library to get free access to decent connection speeds AND access the library files electronically (for California check here https://www.library.ca.gov/services/to-libraries/ebooks-for-all/ - every state has an equivalent ). People, including kids, check out books (and periodicals) electronically 24/7.
It was shocking to me just how prevalent lack of broadband is. I moved in with my in-laws in norcal midway through the pandemic and the only internet service choices were a 600Kbps DSL line or Verizon mobile hotspots at 3-5Mbps (which is a massive blessing in comparison). I worked remotely and would frequently have to drive to Target or a coffee shop in town to download anything. They aren't even in that rural an area - there were houses about half a mile away with gigabit cable. The cable company wanted nearly $70,000 to build out a line.
Not exactly the same but similar... There's 4 major providers who service my area, but only one of them extends down my block. So I can choose from DSL (which to be fair goes up to like 35 Mbps), but if I want higher, I'm vendor locked to Xfinity, who charges at least 2x the price of the local companies.
Ive asked several times, but they quote hundreds of thousands of dollars to trench fiber down my street, and it's just not worth it.
Except, you know, there's already fiber from Xfinity... They just wont share.
The physical cabling needs to be government owned and rented out to the companies, not exclusively owned by one single company. We'll never have competitive pricing unless it's nationalized infrastructure
Yeah same here. It's either xfinity or satellite internet. Nothing else.
Nearest Target to me is an hour away. I really thought our one local bank surely had wifi (no, of course a bank doesn't have wifi, silly, security too big a risk, duh). It's our little teeny 1930s public library or nothing. So this San Francisco story hit me square in the chops as something like that here would take away our only free access point. Why would anybody do that?!?
Good lord. The pandemic shutdowns sucked for me (I have two kids myself), but the more I hear about other people's experiences, the more I realize I really lucked out.
Why not? It cost them next to nothing to leave it on. It actually is more work to turn off and on the router every day. I don’t see why not being to check out books had to do with internet. Why does it have to be all or nothing?
I would guess all commercial routers and access points hae the option to automate something like that. So you only have to set it up once and it's not really much work (unless something breaks)
Yeah but that requires even less effort to automate than manually turning it off and on. But the point is why put in the effort at all to do this? I mean rhetorically because I know everyone just wants to push the homeless to “anywhere but here”
I can't go and take out a book at 1am
I can. My library has online services like ebook rentals that can be accessed 24/7.
Exactly this. A housed, or unhoused person, can’t use the library 24/7, so why should there be an exception for Wi-Fi at night?
because it costs $0 and unhoused people deserve access to education and resources at night same as those who are housed and have their own wifi?
this isnt about the wifi anyway, it's an attempt to chase homeless people out of populated areas bc rich people are scared to be confronted with the human cost of their actions.
you're fucking disgusting. i wish you the worst things.
Please don't attack and insult each other. Give the other user the benefit of doubt and assume good faith even if it comes alongside ignorance. You're free to ask questions to get them to clarify their point if you think they're spreading hate speech but please wait for unambiguous intolerance before launching off on someone 💜
i'm like the barest thread away from homelessness. i don't think it's fair to tone police me down when people are expressing disgust about people in a position i'll probably be in when i'm too old to pay my bills with unwanted subsistence sex work. when people are supporting measures designed to make life more hostile for people like that.
people who express disgust about unhoused people, and believe it's okay to throttle their already super limited access to society, are lost causes. that's violent instigation against people who can't defend themselves and these attitudes get. people. killed.
it's weird how even spaces on fedi require that you Politely and Respectfully Debate people who lead with genocidal intent. think about who was impolite or intolerant first. think about whether anything i said was "unprovoked." anyway speaking of tolerance i have none for environments that aren't safe for poor and unhoused folk and it's, all things considered, unsurprising that a model based on reddit ended up being, predominantly, another That.
best of luck and goodbye i guess. you can have the genocide people or you can have their victims but you can't have both.
I'm not sure if you're already gone and I tried to make it as clear as possible that I didn't think you were wrong. I understand this can read as tone policing, I was just asking for you to drop the very final part of your post because the other person didn't directly attack you and could have been coming from a place of ignorance. It's not on you to educate them either. To be clear I wasn't going to take any negative action on you and I didn't remove your post either because I believe both of those would be tone policing. But it's also really hard to have a place where people feel welcome and think it's nice while also explicitly being a safe space- in fact this is proof that for some people it might not work. My read on this person was that they were uninformed, not that they were necessarily attacking you. Their post consisted of nothing more than a question which comes from the ignorance and privilege of never being homeless. Yes, they might be an asshole worthy of scorn, I'm mostly just asking we confirm someone's a Nazi before we start punching.
If you're still around and want to talk in more depth about this let me know. I'm sorry I failed you 😔
I agree with you. I also agree with her. At the same time, you are correct, it was unprovoked and this was the correct mod action (not that you need my approval or anything, I just an really happy to see mods step in on stuff like this).
Thank you for making Beehaw such a wonderful place <3 I have never enjoyed social media as much as I have in the past 2 days or so.
I was with you until the end there. Really uncalled for to call someone disgusting and wish harm upon them because they have a different opinion than yours.
If you read the article, it’s not about rich people seeing homeless folks, it’s about vandalism and open drug use on the sidewalks. You don’t have to be rich or white to feel uneasy while stepping over bodies sprawled out on the sidewalk or walking by human waste and needles in the bushes the next morning.
Perhaps there’s a middle ground like keeping the Wi-Fi on but requiring login with a (free) library card.
if your opinion is, it's correct to chase homeless people out of the few spaces they have access to, being told you're an anti-social monster who doesn't deserve anything good until you fix your revolting black heart, is getting off super easy.
opinions on how to best reorganize urban settings to promote access to parks and public transportation? i'll be respectful. "opinions" that displace and kill people? they create complicity in murder and violence and you deserve to be absolutely and firmly cast out of any meaningful discussion.
if you're uncomfortable with unhoused people existing, go do some activism. when enough of you murderous clowns come around and something gets done to house these people, great. we're good. until then, shut the fuck up you monster, they hang out in populated spaces as means of survival, not to inconvenience dumb privileged slobs like you.
there's no middle ground or space for debate here in ethical or pragmatic terms. your behaviour is disgusting and violent. it doesn't matter that you're too stupid or selfish to know or care.
Congrats, you’re one of the first lunatics I’ve seen since joining the Fediverse!
Just a reminder that Jello Biafra from the San Francisco group Dead Kennedys wrote a song called Kill The Poor, satirizing the heartless attitudes even back in 1980. He also ran for mayor of SF. Part of his platform was businessmen in downtown would have to wear clown suits. Would have been great if he had won.
hahahahah i know little bits about biafra's delightful weirdness. i'd rather see a well-meaning bonkers ass joke mayor than a serious one who gets a bunch of people killed on purpose
100%. I completely understand those news stories you hear where some town elected a dog to be their mayor.
We made a schizophrenic dude Emperor of San Francisco that one time
Not the person you are replying to, but that's really uncalled for. It's a difference of opinion and none of us are in the position of decision making for the San Francisco Public Library.
A better policy would be for the city to provide universal Wi-Fi access across the city, instead of putting the burden on one public entity in one part of the city.
To be fair, several of these responses have been pretty disgusting in their disregard for homeless people. Also, why is it "unhoused" now and not "homeless". Seems like the semantics are something George Carlin would have fun with.
I'm not sure what their preferred would be. Homeless, unsheltered, unhoused, I guess it would be important to find out from them. Homeless might be a misnomer as some of them may find that anywhere is their home? Not sure, not my space
I've been homeless. We didn't give a fuck. Call us whatever as long as it's not insulting.
what people call you and how you're referred to affects how you're treated, directly. this is why propaganda works. i'd like to think carlin would understand that fucking around with marginalized groups trying to better their perception and situation is probably not super cool, and that it'd be much more chill to go after the powerful assholes doing the marginalizing. but who knows.
the word homeless has stigma attached thanks to movies, tv, politicians, news. unhoused drops alot of that stigma. removing that stigma is important in the interest of allowing people to feel empathy for those affected rather than fear. i still slip every now and again but the rationale makes sense and i'm trying to do better.
I'm guessing you've never seen the bit where Carlin goes from Shell Shocked -> Battle Fatigued -> Operational Exhaustion -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The whole thing about changing these terms is it tends to undermine the seriousness of the issues being discussed. And the marginalized people that are effected.
it categorically does not undermine the seriousness of what's being discussed. it casts aside stigma and hatred lumped onto groups from the outside and allows people in marginalized groups some degree of agency or choice in how they're named which usually results in more accurate terminology that's adaptive and capable of shifting away from terms and meanings applied by unaffected people in media and politics. these changes also create community and organization in marginalized groups
source: being gay and trans
i haven't seen the bit. but there is literally no evidence that seriousness gets undermined. sure, bigots will use shifts in terminology to mock their targets, but bigots were always going to do bigot shit anyway. again, i'd like to believe that carlin would've seen how things progressed into the 2010s and 2020s and painted targets on the powerful instead of the powerless.
Changing terminology sucks oxygen out of the room. Sometimes it's important. Often it's not. We end up talking about Latino vs Latin vs Latinx, instead of immigration reform or better esl resources.
bigots will use shifts in terminology to mock their targets, but bigots were always going to do bigot shit anyway
Yep, exactly how I think.
The reason the library isn't open 24/7 is that it's expensive to keep paying people to staff it for so many more hours, plus those are hours you'd have to pay even more because working at night sucks. The WiFi access point doesn't have those issues. You can leave it on and help people for almost no money.
Right, they don’t close the library at night because they have some moral objection to people checking out books at 1AM, it’s just a question of how to allocate their resources. I believe some public libraries, such as Salt Lake City, are experimenting with staying open 24/7.