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Everyone knows that America's big cities and especially San Francisco live in their own financial bubbles.
Average rent in the City by the Bay is nearly four times greater than the US average, coming in at $3,750 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. The cost of living is 80 per cent higher than the rest of America. A typical cup of coffee costs a demented $6 – and some will charge a mind-boggling $20. The internet surge of the past few years has only deepened the problem: tech bros earning six-figure salaries have edged out working families, and homelessness, despite a slight retreat recently, remains high.
But among all the issues that have been rudely visited upon San Francisco, the one that has rich people most riled up is also the most human: shit. As in other people's shit. Dog shit, too, but mostly human shit.
Thanks to the impossible cost of living in the city and a repeated refusal by residents to cough up enough money to deal with the jump in homeless folk, more people that[sic] ever before are living on the streets with no where to go at night and – thanks to no one wanting to dirty up wonderfully clean and luxurious shopping centers and office buildings – no where to go (as in go) during the day. The result: shit. Tons of it.
"I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I've ever seen growing up here," said the city's new mayor London Breed recently. "That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs – we’re talking about from humans."
And so San Francisco has decided to deal with it in the only way it knows how: pay others to erase the problem from its sight. But before you wonder who on earth would accept a job cleaning up other people's excrement in one of the most expensive cities in the world, consider this: it pays well. Really well.
[...] All of which means that if you are lucky enough to grab a coveted spot on the Poop Patrol – it's a ten-person crew with its own minivan – you will earn a base salary of $71,760 a year. Add in benefits including health insurance, pension and so on and it brings the package to a rather enticing $184,678 a year.
Source: www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/25/san_francisco_clean_up/
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday August 27 2018, @01:30PM
I forgot to mention it also needs a new kind of economy based on businesses sustaining a certain size rather than on infinite growth. Infinite growth requires eternal population growth. I suppose you could punish a business for expanding beyond a certain size through taxation but you'd also need to reward sustainability so there's carrot as well as stick. If you reward a business financially for maintaining a constant size and profitability, that would mean they would have extra capital on top of their profits which they wouldn't be able to reinvest into the business without paying it out as taxes. I guess they'd have to pay it out as increased dividends or raise wages. I'm not sure whether that would cause inflation.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?