Exactly, the main problem these people are having is not a mystery - it's that they don't have housing. There are often addiction or mental health issues, but anyone who has experienced these problems in the past understands that being homeless at the same time is catastrophic. Giving people housing while they get on their feet is the simplest, cheapest, most humane, and most effective policy. It's been proven to work in Finland and other places to great effect: https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
I think it says a lot about the HN crowd that people are downvoting you for saying this. Everyone wants either to police/arrest homeless people (even more than they already are, apparently) or to make their lives even harder so they'll go somewhere else. Neither of those "solutions" addresses the root of the problem - that these people have nowhere to go - and homelessness will continue until they are provided with housing. People love to wring their hands about how homelessness is such a hard problem but they don't want to even consider the obvious solution that would both fix the root problem and treat people with dignity.
Pointing out that Hacker News tends to be white (and more importantly wealthy or have strong aspirations of wealth), or that the demographics present here affect the discussions on this site, doesn't tend to go over well. :P Here at the orange site, we like to think we're all rational machines of pure logic, and all of our opinions on how humanity should live are simply the obvious and objective truth. Bonus points if it matches the status quo.
Homelessness is simple to fix. Build homes, let people live in them. But the framework we've created, our beliefs about capitalism, fairness, and that survival should be "earned," prevent a lot of people from even considering the obvious options.
When some people look at homeless people, sometimes they think "This is gross, I wish I did not have to look at homeless person," and they stop their analysis there. The empathy of "wow damn, imagine being that guy and how much it would suck" doesn't really happen, for whatever reason. Maybe it's just a self-assurance "that could never happen to me, because I make good choices. Conversely, that guy must have made bad choices, and that is why he deserves to be swept away from my sight. His crime of looking weird on public transit is yet more evidence of his unworthiness." Y'know, the Just World fallacy, and all that.
The "empathy gap" talked about in Big Tech is a bit of a misnomer, I think. I don't think that the kinds of people running FAANG are any less empathetic than the oil tycoons were, or Ma Bell, or the leaders of any other profitable industries.
But we didn't expect Big Oil to help out the little guy, to give a damn if their procurement pipelines were ethical. We all know the guys running BP Gas only rebranded "green" in a cynical attempt to clean up their image after the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Big Tech, though, is different in what it promises. It promises not to sell you cheaper oil, but a better life. Voice assistants are the Star Trek future, Facebook is a way to stay in touch with Grandma, OKCupid is a site to help people find their soulmates. Robots will free us from toil and drudgery, Uber empowers drivers, Nextdoor brings communities together, and a hundred other obvious lies get told to us.
The "empathy gap," when it comes to tech, is the gap between what they promise, and what they deliver. Twitter doesn't ban Nazis and encourages "engagement". Facebook spreads political misinformation. AirBNB and Uber are just barely-regulated clones of hotels & taxis. Github sells services to ICE. Amazon works their employees to the bone. Google promotes slot-machine apps on the Android store because they get a cut of their users' gambling addictions. Youtube directs people to white nationalist videos.
And, when a company is clearly unethical, but it's making you rich, how could that select for employees with high empathy? How could the workplace culture not tend toward siding with the rich over the poor, when everyone there is making 6 figures and dreaming of the day they'll cash out on 8 figures?
SF's tech boom not only attracts people who aren't empathetic, it selects for it and encourages it. As rents rise ever higher and gentrification continues to squeeze out those on the margins, how could the result not be a growing anti-poor-people sentiment? When all your coworkers are wealthy, when all your neighbors are wealthy, that guy who hasn't bathed in a week (because he has no way to) stands out like a sore, gross thumb. They don't see anything of themselves in him, or of anyone they know.
People who are poor, or who have been poor, consistently rate higher on empathy. A pool of rich people (or people who strongly value wealth) congregating in an area and driving everyone else out, is going to reduce the empathy in that space. Whether that space is San Francisco or Hacker News, the culture changes, and people stop caring so much about those who aren't as fortunate.
It's not comparable in scale. ICE does terrible things and these things need to stop. They need to stop now. At the same time, let's not create a false equivalence. The scale matters - killing one person is monstrous, but killing 1 million is in a completely different moral level.
What I'm trying to say is that the scale of repression of free will and thinking, torture, murder, impoverishment you observe in NK is simply incomparable, from any reasonable angle, to anything happening in western democracies (and to many other countries that aren't western democracies).
The critical point is that the US has never cared about any other country in the world. Every foreign policy decision is based on what is advantageous to the US at the time. For example, you seem to believe that the US is fighting Islamic extremism for the good of the world and the people in the places it's bombing. If that were a priority for the US, don't you think they'd have a problem with the Islamic extremism and dictatorship promoted and brutally enforced by their close allies in the Saudi Arabian government? Instead, the US just agreed to sell the Saudi regime more weapons.
The US engages with the rest of the world in a way that is advantageous to the US. This is clear when you learn about the modern history of US foreign policy[1]. The US backed over 40 authoritarian coups through the 20th century. To write such a long comment about how the US cares about the places they bomb is at best naivety and at worst willful ignorance.
> The critical point is that the US has never cared about any other country in the world. Every foreign policy decision is based on what is advantageous to the US at the time.
s/US/<any-country>/
Acting according to self interest is not unique to the US. And just to be clear that doesn't mean that any country's foreign policy is immune from criticism just that the US isn't unique in this respect.
>When such people get their papers, green cards, and work in USA for some time, their opinion on illegal immigrants, who skip the whole process (and sometimes even get praised for that) is a lot different than the comments you see on reddit. They might not say it there, but they say it here.
Surely you realize that the people who come to the US without documents aren't doing the same job or getting close to the same compensation as you? If you want to pay a smuggler a few thousand dollars so you can work in a meat packing plant and risk you and your kids being locked up at any time, you can also follow their path. The fact that this is the best option for these people should tell you something about the circumstances they are in and how they differ from yours.
Because they have no incentive to? Not sure what that question has to do with my response.
I'll try making my point in a different way. You seem to have some kind of resentment for undocumented immigrants because you went through a long immigration process and they didn't, and now you both work in the US. My point is that the facts that you're both immigrants and work in the US are the only similarities. They have to work hard jobs for little pay, and look over their shoulders for their whole lives knowing they could be locked up at any moment. They're not getting the same reward that you did for going through the immigration process. You don't have anything to be resentful towards them about.
Nah, I didn't, I stayed at home, I'm just telling the issue my friends and former coworkers had. They get paid well (we're talking coders/developers/engineers, not meat packers).
Why do americans have no incentive to work in meat packing plants? What you're advocating for is to offer (below) minimum/livable pay for every work possible, and then, if noone local applies (because the wage is too low), just get some foreign workers from some shitty country (legal or illegal), and exploit them. Wouldn't it be better to just stop immigration for shitty paid jobs (in situations like now, with relatively high unemployment), and passively force the employers to just pay more to get enough workers?
When a big company (eg. one with a logo of a famous mouse), fires whole teams of local workers, and replaces them with cheaper H1B workers ( https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/disney-h1b-worke... ), whole HN/reddit/... is outraged, with "disney bad!". Why would you let meat packing plants do this? Why not just say "no, you wont get immigrant workers, when there are so many local ones unemployer, and you'll get punished if you hire illegals", and just work with that?
Otherwise, again, as someone living in a small EU country, i could never understand how a large company can employ illegal workers, and how illegals can stay in the country (and even get benefits, send kids to school, etc.), without the system noticing (because all of that is pretty much impossible anywhere else in the developed world.
I agree with you that the employers exploiting the workers is the core problem. My disagreement is that you can't blame undocumented immigrants for taking the job, they're just trying to survive.
>how [undocumented immigrants] can stay in the country (and even get benefits, send kids to school, etc.)
"Immigrants taking benefits" is a big misconception pushed by right wingers and others with anti-immigrant sentiments. Getting any kind of government benefit of significance in the US is hard even for citizens. If you don't have documents they'll laugh you out of the office.
I hope you're not suggesting banning the children of undocumented immigrants from attending school would somehow be more fair. Pretty clearly they didn't have a choice in the matter.
I just don't understand how you can send a kid to school without any papers/documents/etc.? Here (in slovenia), every citizen has a citizen ID (not really public, but not secret, and can be generated by hand), you have a permanent resident address, your kid belongs to that school district, your kid has a medical file, documents (medical card too), everything, and without all the papers and the kid being "in the system", there's no way for a kid to go to school here.
If I understand correctly, you can just bring a random kid to school, say "this here is bobby, he'll be going to school here", and they just take him? Without an ID, any checks, checks on parents, etc.?
Same with jobs.... i understand the "under the table" jobs, e.g. picking fruit and getting paid in cash at the end of the day.... this is theoretically possible here too.... but people working in large companies? How do you get paid? How do you even open a bank account? Here, again, you need an ID and a tax number, every bank account is tied to your personal tax number, and you get paid to that account. When you start your job, the company has to pay for benefits (pension, medical, etc.), and those are tied via your tax number and paid directly to the government. Just to start working, you need to pass a medical exam, where they also check your documents, and even check your medical records from your personal doctor.
As I said, i'm not advocating for anything, I just don't understand how you can do all that, without being a citizen, having your ID number, tax number, bank account, ID card, registered permanent residence, etc.
(yes, there are exceptions, foreign workers get temporary tax numbers, and use special documents, kids of diplomats get special documents again, etc., but in general, if you're not "in the system", there's no way to do anything).
In the US, that is how hard it is to get a government benefit like unemployment or food stamps, but public schools are one exception. There have been several states that have passed laws banning undocumented immigrant, but those laws were ruled to be unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1981 because to deny education to these children would ”deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation." More info here: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/plyler-v.... As you can imagine, people who hate immigrants also hate that court decision, but it's the law of the land and I think it is fair.
The case with employment is pretty different, I don't know much about it other than that the employers figure out how to pay people with cash in a way that they're able to not get caught very often.
But really my point is just that undocumented immigrants work incredibly hard at essential jobs and have very difficult lives, and hating them for not going through a long legal process that's usually not even open to them is unfair.
I lived in a former communist country ("former" in both ways... not communist anymore, and also, I haven't moved, the country just doesn't exist anymore).
Wanting to get cheaper labour is universal, capitalism has nothing to do with that.
>There is not a single democratic govt in the ME sans Israel
The millions of Palestinians unable to vote for the government that controls their movement, trade, and lives in general would probably disagree with your characterization of Israel as a democracy.
Unfortunately, "democracy" doesn't mean "liberal democracy" and it certainly doesn't mean "nice democracy".
For instance, in the Athenian democracy women and metics (immigrants) couldn't vote and slavery was legal. In modern times, the USA, the model of modern democracies, has the largest military in the world (in history!) and does not hesitate to use it to crush lesser nations.
I wouldn't be able to tell you what "democratic" means exactly (I'm not a political scientist) but I susepect having elections without limits on who can vote and who can stand for office, having independent courts and the rule of law are important criteria and under those Israel sure checks out as a democracy. Its people are free. It just happens to keep crushing some other people, who are not its own people, under its heel.
I think what the GP was getting at was that having a sizable population of people living within the de-facto boundaries of a state who are unable to vote (in this case, because they lack citizenship) makes it less democratic.
That's a slightly different problem than the fact that democracies can be terrible if the voters choose terrible things.
I downvoted for the obnoxious phrasing of "Wrong. Try again." It goes against the first paragraph of the HN commenting guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You were not responding to the snark but egging on a troll who made a serious political issue about an innocent mention of Israel in the pondering about the course of Persian history this century.
Virtue signalers pop out of the woodwork each time Israel is mentioned. They don't ask everyone to preface each mention on Turkey with their persecution of the Kurds or their refusal to accept the Armenian Genocide. They don't take each mention of Egypt to talk about the Coptic exodus but each mention of Israel has to be prefaced.....this is insanity.
I sincerely feel for the Palestinians because half the world is using them as their club for virtue signaling. This just eggs them to fight to the last Palestinian and give up every chance for peace and their own nation they ever had.
Neither Hamas not the PLO hold the power of the state, therefore there are not democratic elections, therefore Palestine isn't a democratic nation. The immediate reason why they cannot hold elections for their government is because of Israeli occupation. Therefore, there are people that Israel exercise the power of the State over that do not vote for the State, therefore it is not a democracy.
I suppose you could argue that with PLO, but not Hamas. They are in complete control of Gaza have been since 2007. They could have held elections there anytime they wanted to. But they won't.
> Despite the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza,[21] the United Nations, international human rights organisations, and the majority of governments and legal commentators consider the territory to be still occupied by Israel, supported by additional restrictions placed on Gaza by Egypt. Israel maintains direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza: it controls Gaza's air and maritime space, and six of Gaza's seven land crossings. It reserves the right to enter Gaza at will with its military and maintains a no-go buffer zone within the Gaza territory. Gaza is dependent on Israel for its water, electricity, telecommunications, and other utilities.[21] The system of control imposed by Israel is described as an "indirect occupation".
If the citizens in the Falklands or Guantanamo weren't allowed to vote, you would have a point, however they are allowed to vote, so you don't have a point.
The standard is occupation of a territory without giving them or its inhabitants the right to vote.
The result of their last election led to Israeli raids, detention of parliament/cabinet members, and increased sanctions from both Israel and the US. Why would they want a new election? Further, Israel and the US have both given signals saying that next time they'll ensure the results they want
The GP was talking about Palestinians being unable to vote. While it's easy to place blame Palestine issues on the US and Israel, in this case it's clear that elections are not taking place because Fatah and Hamas can't get their house in order.
The discussion is about Palestinian sovereignty. When your election results in the kind of retaliation I mentioned, why would you work towards another? Such elections aren't proof of democracy.
I figured saying "The result of their last election led to..." made it clear when this happened. The blockade resulting from those events is still ongoing, these things aren't ancient history.
The Palestinians definitely deserve democracy, however creating one will require more than just an election.
The blockade resulted from Hamas sniping at Israel with mortars and missiles and rockets for nearly 15 years - which also caused 2-3 major wars.
The moment they stop their shenanigans is the day the blockade ends.
I agree that creating a democracy needs more than just an election. However, perhaps letting them vote in some new people might result in governance that is willing to play ball and come up with some kind of agreement.
>The blockade resulted from Hamas sniping at Israel with mortars and missiles and rockets for nearly 15 years - which also caused 2-3 major wars
It was initiated as part of the postelection economic sanctions. Israel cites the rocket attacks for making it necessary to continue, but that is not the start.
>However, perhaps letting them vote in some new people might result in governance that is willing to play ball and come up with some kind of agreement.
Or it gives the US and Israel a chance to rectify their previous mistake and ensure their chosen candidates win. Democracy!
They didn't just mix with Arabs. Many Palestinians are descendants from the 12 tribes of Israel but have been disowned be the rest of those tribes because their ancestors changed religions.
No, you're getting downvoted for stating falsehoods. Israel economically and militarily controls the occupied territories. Holding phony elections for "leaders" that are powerless to do anything because they wield no state power is not democracy. This would be true even if Gaza wasn't under an illegal blockade which prevents residents of Gaza from leaving without Israeli permission and prevents those from other countries from visiting or engaging in commerce with Gaza without Israeli permission.
Reasonable people can disagree over what the way forward is in Israel, but people who deny reality in order to push their agenda are not reasonable.
I searched and I cannot see how you found 450 mil for population of arabs in te world. I even counted Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan and none of these are arbs.
Also, I talked to a palistinian friend and she thinks palistinians did not vote for Hamas becasue that was the choise. The other ones were just so corrupt. Any way your sentimate is just too reductive for a very complicated region.
Algerian here. While there are certainly Arabs in the Maghreb, we’re not all Arabs and don’t generally identify as Arab. My family identifies as Amazigh. Most Algerians will tell you they’re Algerian, not Arab. Many friends from other parts of the Maghreb identify similarly.
Having been to the Maghreb, I completely agree with you. There are Tuaregs and Amazigh and even the locals who are "Arabs" are a mixture. I should have used the term Arab-speaking world instead of Arab. There is no ethnic notion of Arabs as a race and I understand that. Shukran :)
No, you're getting downvoted for ignoring the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, something akin to the holocaust that was inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis is being repeated now on the Palestinians, who are technically their distant cousins.
You are being downvoted because you ignore history conveniently to support an apartheid state like Israel.
Everything I said about the Palestinian elections is from Wikipedia and their direct words. You also ignore the fact that Arabs in Israel are the only Arabs (other than the Tunisian, occasionally) who can vote and have their own parties.
Palestinians Arabs have had one national election and Israeli Arabs vote as often as Israel has elections which seems to be happening every year.
Criticize Israel's conduct all you want but please come with facts.
The wikipedia article indicates an absence of democracy in Palestine, haltingproblem, wouldn't you agree?
> Israel does not allow free exercise of political activities; checkpoints and separation walls hinder many social activities. The Legislative Council cannot properly function because free travel is impossible, especially between Gaza and the West Bank, regardless of hostilities between Fatah and Hamas. Members of the Palestinian Legislative Council and other politicians have been subject to lengthy detentions by Israel or even killed
Israel is not a democratic country because it supports the Saudi monarchy, a completely unprincipled, and despotic regime. Basically a Middle Eastern North Korea.
A political regime supporting an inherently antidemocratic system is not democractic by the definition.
They are also very fond of the Egyptian Sisi, an another tinpot despot.
And am not joking here. People need to finally stop thinking of it as a some kind of tinfoil thing. The Israel—Saudi—Egyptian axis is 100% real. It sounds bizarre, but its true, been documentary verified, and supported by accounts of many diplomats of 3rd countries, US included. The open source investigatory journalists, among other things, established the fact of regular visits of their top officials to each other's countries.
So does the US, UK, France, Germany. By your definition there are no democracies in the world.
I was talking about the glories of Persian civilization and its glories and you had to drag in the "evil US-Saud-Egyptian" axis. You got an axe to grind.
Surely the Persian civilization was glorious and it could still shine. The problem was you mentioning Israel and denigrating the Palestinians. I urge you to take a second look at this issue, Israel is a terrible oppressor of these people.
They do. They voted for their government in 2006. Then the ones who they elected decided to not hold elections again. Its good to virtue signal for Palestinians but atleast get the facts right.
You're demonstrating that anyone can pick any facts to tell any story.
According to 'haltingproblem, self determination is being able to vote in an election in an occupied territory where there is no freedom of movement and a large portion of the population is dependent on humanitarian aid.
Since this is all so simple and clear to you, can you please arrange your facts to explain what the 982 UN resolutions on the "Question of Palestine" are about?
Out of these three, I think one one goes as far as do so boldly, loudly, and on the record.
> the "evil US-Saud-Egyptian" axis. You got an axe to grind.
Of course I do. For as long as I have a dime of moral judgement, and integrity, I will. Spawning Laden, Qaeda, other tinpot outfits, funding rogue dictatorships of Bashirs, Sisis, Gaddafis, committing the unspeakable barbarity of 9.11 attack, and effectively breaking the world as it is, for the last 20 years. What out of this is not worth the outrage???
That they've eradicated coronavirus in Wuhan? The photos are pretty self-evident. If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.
>AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists so that they have sole control over the truth.
I'm not able to find a source to confirm that, but I do see some news articles from earlier this year abiut China revoking press credentials for journalists from 3 US news outlets. AFAICT from searching, journalists from other countries and news outlets are not affected.
If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.
I disagree with the conclusion here by looking at what people are willing to do locally.
> If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.
A tad misleading, if people cannot communicate publicly about people getting sick or hear this from media, why wouldn't they go to a music festival? They wouldn't know. Interested to hear your thoughts
>If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.
If the coverup was effective why wouldn’t they? We know the Chinese government is extremely good at propagandizing their own citizens.
The Chinese government is not "extremely good" at propagandizing their own citizen. Many Chinese know that there's censorship, and they take their media with a grain of salt. Chinese propaganda is also extremely crude, simple and straightforward. If you watch Chinese propaganda for a while, you will notice this. Especially many of those who have been overseas know that western propaganda is much, much more sophisticated and harder to detect compared to Chinese propaganda.
Don't we have evidence from other countries that some people will, in fact, put themselves at risk when the virus is spreading? It's certainly not the Chinese government's official position that the virus is gone forever and everyone's safe now.
> That they've eradicated coronavirus in Wuhan? The photos are pretty self-evident. If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.
I think you underestimate the power of government propaganda.
If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.
It's not like covid is the black plague, bodies don't pile up in the streets no matter how bad it gets. Some elderly die here and there and life moves on (and plus it doesn't spread all that fast because mask usage is a cultural thing there anyway).
I just have a hard time believing that a country with as much corruption, pollution, and just general lack of sanitation as China does has "completely eradicated" the virus, meanwhile South Korea is taking containment measures for its latest wave.
I think more it's more likely China just put on a dog and pony show for the world, but really they haven't eradicated covid at all and the citizens are just kept in ignorance. This is, of course, gross speculation with no evidence to back it up. But in my mind it's like "the most populous country on the planet claims they've only had 4,634 deaths total due to covid, hmm..." and I start to think I'm being lied to by a country that wants to save face on the world stage.
Then again, maybe this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies. When you have a god king that can force 11 million people to take a medical test within 14 days (or else?), you have an upper hand over countries where stuff like "due process" and "deliberation" slow down policy making.
>If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.
Nonsense. Chinese people aren't an unthinking monolith. Like anywhere else, some people believe whatever the government tells them, some people believe any old nonsense on social media and some are savvy and sceptical.
The only thing more effective than Chinese censorship of the internet is the efforts of Chinese citizens to satirise and subvert it.
Ya their satirizing is so effective you have to go back 10 years for an article about it but their social credit system would have downgraded you for reading that article.
I think the level of naivete on your part shows someone who doesn't worry about getting called for tea.
China has been releasing padded GDP numbers for the past 15 years. Many have doubted the true economic growth. Yet now magically they're the top economic competitor to the United States and being taken seriously as a threat to global leadership?
There is clear evidence of the virus being taken care of, so I'm pretty sure if numbers are off, they're off in the same way GDP is padded, and not orders of magnitude off.
> this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies
Yes, and I'd go further and say it's not just democracies and dictatorships but cultures of individualism and collectivism. It's no coincidence that east asia has done so well (South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore) compared to the US and much of Europe.
If a corporation is going to transplant workers to a plantation in an unsafe place, then the corporation has responsibility for keeping the workers safe.
A big element of their case that's oddly not mentioned in this Guardian article is that the violence was foreseeable and nothing was done to stop it. The tensions did not bubble up overnight, and this was not the first instance of violence in an otherwise peaceful place. There were many signs that something like this could happen, and Unilever declined to spend resources on keeping the workers safe. As a result many of the workers were raped and murdered. Now the survivors are seeking justice, and they deserve it.
Unilever are the corporation who was ultimately profiting from the employees' work, so the survivors have a right to seek justice from them directly.
> If a corporation is going to transplant workers to a plantation in an unsafe place, then the corporation has responsibility for keeping the workers safe.
Citation needed - I never heard of a corporation being required (or allowed) to do law enforcement (private security companies might be contracted bt the government, but simply going and doing is most definitely not possible). The UN declares that a responsibility of governments, and one of the keys to the land claim and recognition of the state.
In some jurisdictions it's legal to stop a crime by appropriate means, but it is not a responsibility of any private person or entity, and it also does not mean you do it normally - that's where you're crossing into the "private army" territory.
There ought to be some consequences for knowingly putting and leaving people in a place where they are likely to be raped and murdered.
Contracting adequate (local or foreign) private security is not the only way to resolve a situation like this. You could also remove the people.
That's what the government is for. Either let the corporation be wholly responsible for safety (including things like surveillance, risk analysis, prevention etc), or don't complain about the corporation not doing it when there is a government saying they have it covered. Why are you not angry at the government for not stopping this foreseeable crime?
I think it says a lot about the HN crowd that people are downvoting you for saying this. Everyone wants either to police/arrest homeless people (even more than they already are, apparently) or to make their lives even harder so they'll go somewhere else. Neither of those "solutions" addresses the root of the problem - that these people have nowhere to go - and homelessness will continue until they are provided with housing. People love to wring their hands about how homelessness is such a hard problem but they don't want to even consider the obvious solution that would both fix the root problem and treat people with dignity.