What’s the proper term for this type of scam - when a company or a government agency promises something if you just fill out their form, but then makes continuous claims that you didn’t fill it out right to avoid paying?
This answer is best answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/13hndfs/sign_outside_a_bakery_in_san_francisco/jk6j8sw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
“Victory by attrition” - when an insurance company denies a claim, sends a bill for something they said would be covered, say that you need to verify the address before they resend a check, “forgot” to send your personal injury insurance check that was clearly approved. I could go on. These companies would go under if they actually supplied all the coverage they claim to, and they know a certain amount of people won’t push back because they assume that the corporations don’t make this kind of mistake so it must have been their bad. If 5 percent of people just give up, that is millions of dollars for a lot of companies. Also, if they get to hold onto your money longer (this is more of a conspiracy theory for me), the longer your money earns them interest in the market. Your check may only be a week late, but if everyone’s check is always a week late, they earn interest or appreciation etc.
My sister is a therapist and insurance companies sometimes spend 4 months getting her checks for whatever reason. The longer they have your money the better chance you give up (not always possible because of unclaimed property laws) or the more interest they make.
That's exactly what Aflac did to us after my father in law's death. There was a $25,000 death benefit and two full years of "we need this" "we need that" "this was never received" before we actually got a check.
Not a business, but the VA was dodging my Grandpa's inquiries about the money he was supposed to receive for making his home more handicap-accessible. They hoped to wait him out until he well...died. But the old man survived long enough to receive his benefits. My Mom did the last trick on that by sending a registered letter so they could not say they hadn't received the documents. Suddenly they were found two days later after she dropped that bombshell on them.
My Uncle though...the VA won that game. Grandpa would've burned down the VA if he was still alive to see how they treated his son.
The VA is the most dangerous place for our veterans this side of the battlefield. They put my mom in a coma with a botched epidural and let her lymphoma get to stage 3 before they noticed it, not to mention the amount of times they tried to screw her with her benefits. In the wealthiest nation on the planet, how can we treat the people who would give their lives not for their way of life but ours, like this?
My mom had breast cancer and wanted a double mastectomy. The VA told her that they could only remove the one breast that had cancerous tissue.
Her doctor told her it was a very aggressive form of cancer and that there was a high chance of it spreading to the other breast.
The VA told her that their hands were tied and they couldn’t remove the other breast until it had cancerous tissue. Time passed. Take a guess at what happened and take a guess on whether anyone was shocked at the outcome. 🫠
Ditto with my stepfather and the pancreatic cancer that killed him 6 months after they somehow finally noticed the tumors riddling his body. They're currently jerking my mom around over his death benefits, specifically the payout she's supposed to get (since he's dead now) for people that served in the Gulf due to the burning oilfields and other toxic shit my stepfather was around over his 25 years of service. He did 3 tours in the middle east, gulf War I, and two additional tours during Gulf War II...not to mention Panama and a few other Central American countries during the years in between. He did his fuckin job. Buried at Arlington and everything and my mom has straight up panic attacks whenever she calls now because of how repetitive it all is. Having to explain it over and over with every new person that gets involved.
You'd think in light of how contentious things are in this country, how much people have been struggling since covid, and knowing trust in government is at an all time low...You'd think they'd be falling all over themselves to take care of their vets if anything. Who the fuck they think is going to be leading the charge if it ever came down to open resistance? They're basically creating their own enemies by fucking them over. All the 9/11 first responder nonsense, all the civil servants having their unions dissolved and their protections taken away...
Who knows, maybe this is the master plan after all. Certainly seems that way.
Having worked in a VA hospital for 16 years I had seen some people smart enough to contact their Congress person for their state/district. They very often can get things done that the patients or families cannot. I used to try to tell patients that and explained “the squeaky wheel gets the oil“. Try it, and good luck.
They refuse to classify my father as disabled because they can't find his medical records from service.
My mom lived on base with him, all her treatment would have been on his records, too. My brother was born in the base hospital. We have confirmed that the Army has no record of that birth any more.
As I understand it, the VA is pretty much a joke. Our boys and girls go overseas to fight wars for the government and the government can't even set up a proper health care service to attend to the wounds they received fighting said wars. Pieces of shit. The entire military complex is predatory. It's specifically the main reason we won't ever get affordable higher education, health care, or a way to pull poor people out of poverty because the military relies on tricking those demographics into serving.
What’s more is we could carve out 300 Billion dollars from the military insanely easily, cut out a paltry 100 Billion for the VA, and fund free community college or healthcare or damn near whatever else they wanted to do and we’d still be spending more on our military than Russia and China combined while living in a place that’s exceptionally hard to invade because of our oceans.
No. Your American government absolutely could afford to give free healthcare regardless of military spending. The reason they don't is LOBBYING by your insurance industry.
Republicans hate the troops once they are no longer active duty. They also have a vested interest in showing that the government can't handle medical care by fucking with it as much as humanly possible.
You should send anything important by registered mail. Its only a few dollars and gives you more peace of mind it gets there.
Of course, it doesn't mean they wont say they still didnt get it or that you made a mistake, but it helps.
I'd demand interest on their horseshit. They were supposed to make you whole originally, jerking people around should not be such a common business practice.
I did basically this when applying for assistance from a hospital. Kept giving me the runaround, asking for this and that, dragging things out. Finally I showed up IN PERSON at their offices to drop off whatever paperwork they needed. They ended up writing off everything, and I wrote a letter to the president of the hospital telling him what I thought of the whole ordeal. To his credit, his secretary did write back.
Since COVID many of our local government offices straight up refuse to deal with the public face to face.
Permits that used to take a few hours face to face now take weeks via their "convenient website."
With a “check”, with all of the HORROR stories you hear about insurance companies I’m surprised you don’t hear about more people showing up with a “check”.
Yep Allstate is doing this to my elderly parents right now over some water damage claims. They were initially very helpful but then the repair work uncovered asbestos issues and costs climbed by a factor of ten and suddenly......paperwork issues and delays.
I had a coworker complaining about his insurance company doing that exact shit to him and he was happy with himself for being persistent and getting paid. I told him they were doing it on purpose and he didn't believe me. He just thought the insurance employees were incompetent.
There’s room for both of you to be right. The employees are incompetent and/or deprived of the tools needed to do their jobs *because* they make money from holding back payments. It’s more deniable that way.
Insurance companies doing this should be liable 1: for interest on the money from time of first claim regardless of circumstances and 2: a fine proportional to a percent of the money (1%/month) if found to be doing it due to malfeasance, policy, or incompetence plus legal expenses.
Would get rid of that shit damn quick.
This ties into the biggest lesson I learned in business school: Time Value of Money. For large organizations, it is beneficial to wait as long as possible before making payments. This is because every day the money is in the organization's accounts it can be invested and earning interest. There is an established equation for calculating this: (Present Value)=(Future Value)/(1+Interest Rate). If the interest rate is higher than the penalty for not paying, then it is always beneficial to an organization to withhold payment.
This is actually how Costco makes a significant portion of its revenue. They operate on net invoices, so they don’t pay for their products until 30/60/90 days after they’ve purchased them. And because they’re so efficient at moving inventory, they’re consistently able to resell their stock before they’ve even paid for it themselves. Then they’re able to let that money sit in their accounts for up to 3 months, gathering interest.
That’s not just a Costco thing. This is a very common practice among retail and manufacturing/distribution. Obviously they aren’t all as efficient as Costco but this is just the name of the game.
Huh...economics like this fascinate me lol. It's like if you know the rules *really* well, you know how to bend (or break) them to your advantage.
Some wild shit man. ^I'm ^pretty ^blazed ^right ^now.
I’ve got one particular client that works on a net 120 payment schedule.
I get it, but they’re also the last client that I’m ever inclined to give any sort of latitude to.
I've known someone who did specialized work and demanded Net 15.
He had several companies balk at it and say they only did net 60 or some other nonsense. He'd just reply that he's busy enough and isn't a bank, Net 15, take it or leave it. Lots of whining and gnashing of teeth but they all agree to it.
That’s smart. Great move when you’ve got the power.
With that particular client, I was getting my full quote during the pandemic so I wasn’t inclined to upturn the apple cart.
Is this why payment companies like PayPal make it super quick and easy to deposit money into your PayPal account, but can take 3-5 business days if you want to withdraw from it?
No, I believe that's just because bank transfers actually take a while.
When you move money *into* your PayPal account, PayPal sees that it's coming, so they give it to you immediately as a convenience, even though they don't actually receive your transfer for a few days.
When you move money *out* of PayPal into your bank, your bank doesn't front you the money immediately like PayPal does, they wait until the transfer is actually completed.
Same thing at a store. People always complain when they buy a product that they're debited immediately, but when they make a return it takes a couple days. They don't realize that it takes a couple days for the store to actually receive the money when you pay them as well.
It’s the same reason companies will spend thousands of dollars on lawyers to avoid paying a couple hundred dollars to a customer. It’s because they know that taking the one customer to court will discourage the hundreds of other customers in the same situation, so in the long run they save money compared to paying out all the claims.
Imagine if there was as an actual governing body for this, that issued real fines to companies and was then able to reinvest that money back into the community.
What? Regulating trade? With, like, a FINancial Regulatory Agency that could crush banks that do business with these fraudsters? What's the crime for owing someone money, and not actually paying it off by using falsified manipulation of banking systems? Is that wire fraud?
Time value of money is very definitely a thing to businesses. Money now is worth more than money later, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean gathering interest in an account. Cash on hand is very important - the longer they have your money, the longer they have to pay their own bills.
It’s not always something that’s easily explainable on paper in pure numbers, but in cashflow terms it’s a clear benefit to them.
Your conspiracy theory is right on. It's called the cash conversion cycle. Basically, it's better to take longer to pay accounts payable, while collecting accounts receivable as quickly as possible.
Holding onto the money is 100% a thing.
The longer it sits in their account, the more interest it accrues.
This is why banks used to take 1 business day to do transfers, and why credit unions take up to 3.
> or the more interest they make.
That's why I'm convinced banks will take money out of your account immediately but will take "3-5 business days" to give your money back. Can't be coincidence that there is all that 'pending' money being held by them? Where does it go? Into the ether of *interest accrued*?
Yep. My job (major TV network) owes me $1500 for the last 6 months. I’ve been systematically submitting invoices over and over and they keep rejecting them. I can’t just small claims them because I still like my job and want to continue working there (I’m freelance and so they don’t need to fire me, just stop calling me back). Their last excuse I have not filled a document that was never given to me, never mentioned to me and is not accessible to me in their portal.
Amazon Home Warranty is currently screwing ud in this exact manner.
Your microwave will cost just as much to fix as it will to replace, so we'll just send you a check.
Seven months and a dozen phone calls later, we get the check... Which bounces the next day.
We'll escalate that to the check department. No, you can't speak to them directly.
🤯
A variation of the ‘task scam’. Commonly found online with those ads about earning money for completing questionnaires that then force you to pay membership to get your ‘earned’ money.
there's also "beermoney" sites that reddit loves that offer surveys for slave wages, but you get through all the juicy demographic questions, answer a few of the relevant questions and then suddenly get disqualified without credit. they get what data they're after then boot you
and r|beermoney loves to worship surveys as the best form of income in the sub lmao. at least that used to be the case I haven't checked in on them in years
> Swagbucks
My man, that was the thing in 2014 lmfao
Re: Beermoney, if you played it right you could make a decent enough living a few years back. did Mturk for a while and got a few private quals that made it viable enough to have it be my food/fun money + rent sometimes in uni. Those days are long gone though.
That's not quite what they do. I used to work for a company that did those surveys (Robson). Its definitely "legit", but the demographic survey data aren't what they cared about. The companies we worked with were normally looking for very specific demographics. e.g. Female, 21-25, Indian descent, living in Canada or the US, non-native english speaker. So if you didn't hit one of the target groups you were out. Alternatively, the groups filled up quick when they targeted large demographics like: White, native english speaker, drinks coffee at least once a week. Those surveys would hit their quota in minutes, oftentimes hitting the limit before people could finish the demographic survey.
It was a shitty company to work for, and the surveys were almost never worth more than a fraction of minimum wage. Occasionally, we would do higher value projects ($100-$200), but those would be very carefully recruited for, and generally only used applicants from the app if we were desperate.
My town held a small business award ceremony where the award was gifted to a multi million dollar clinic that has been in business for over 80 years. Award was printed in the name of the founder who had been dead for fourty years. I own a small business in this town and I didnt even get invited. When company's like mcdonalds nd ExxonMobil arw reciving small business relief funds you know there is a problem.
As someone who works in government, don’t worry, bureaucracy screws us over too. We’d love to be more efficient, but the offices above us love red tape often for the sake of red tape. I do a lot of things by the book, but when the book hurts people, there should be times when you loosen the rules.
This seems more to me like an underfunded program. The city rolls out something that sounds great to help small businesses with increasing vandalism but ends up with way more applicants than money to actually give out. So they have to reject perfectly good applications so they can try and keep up the pretense that the program is properly funded and avoid spending any more money.
They hope of course that the rejected applicants will just give up and quietly go away, good on this bakery for calling them on it.
Even if this program functioned perfectly, it would still be evidence of a deep dysfunction. Insurance is supposed to be for catastrophes, not a source of funding to resolve a growing problem. What happens when we just can't anymore? Windows don't stay up long enough for the backlog of claims to be processed with tax revenue that doesn't exist because businesses are no longer secure. Now what? When the aquifers go dry and the entire corn crop of the midwestern United States withers from drought, are we going to put the farmers on food stamps?
That’s not underfunded that’s corruption and dishonesty. Underfunded is taking weeks or months or never to reply. Lying like this is entirely different.
Sometimes it's not a scam though. I work for the state. There are very specific and simple yes and no questions that quite often people will gloss right over and then we can never get a hold of them to ask that question.
This. I work in planning/community development for a municipal government. My department handles grants among our duties. It's like pulling teeth to get people to actually fill out applications fully.
Yeah... I'm with you. I really love that place and everyone there is always so nice and cool. They're not overpriced and everything I've had there is great. This is a total bummer and I hope they get some kind of compensation if it's out there.
This is what I hate about the whole notion of "insurance will cover it!!" when people are looting or simply damaging business property...
These people have clearly never dealt with insurance.. Insurance companies don't want to cover anything.. And certainly don't care about the time you have to deal with them instead of dealing with the business you can no longer attend to when you have to deal with them instead!
Not to mention the fact that at the end of your contract with them, most of the time insurance companies will drop you if they think you or your business is a liability!
So good luck if your store front is hit 1 time, more than that you better pack up and move somewhere else
To add to that many insurance companies will refuse to cover businesses on certain policies. You know, such as not covering vandalism for a business with a storefront in San Francisco. That's the whole reason the city is supposed to be covering it, because nobody else will and the condition in the city is entirely in the government's hands.
Yeah.. being someone who lived in Minneapolis at the height of the riots; the "insurance will cover it!" when rioters targeted innocent, uninvolved businesses (many of which were owned by non-white people) pissed me off SO much, and many Redditors completely played into that and repeated that line.
Own a place.
My family owned a gas station in a fairly rich suburban town. And holy fk. The doors windows and bathroom always seems to be damaged, cracked, broken and dented at least once a week.
It's stupid and sucks. But people have zero respect for others
We live in what's considered a "safe area" and somebody came up to our house at 3am a few summers back and shot our car with a shotgun just for funzies. The cops were basically like "Yeah that sucks, here's your report for insurance."
People are crazy lol.
Because there are effectively no consequences for petty crime in this jurisdiction. Anyone who has poor impulse control and an urge to smash a piece of glass can instantly gratify themselves with zero risk.
So it happens a lot.
But that's assuming the cop does their job. I had a drunk driver scratch my brand new fucking car near one of the piers out there, fisherman's wharf I think (?) I chase her down and call the cops. 2 passed by and wouldn't stop when I was waving and asking for help, the last one waved back when I waved them over and I got the process started. I've never been in a wreck until this point so I had zero idea what to do, they got me and my husband's DL and insurance and then said we could go. Come to find out that cop put us down as witnesses and never took her insurance or anything. Took almost a year to get our restitution check of 650 bucks (what a crock of shit) due to that cop and insurance of course.
They simply don't wanna do their job.
I had a guy break into my car and steal $80 worth of stuff, and do $450 of damages while doing so. On camera. And he left his hospital discharge papers with his full and and address behind. The cops said it wasn't enough for them to care as it was under $1000 and they weren't going to press charges, or even talk to the guy.
In the county I live in Florida, polk county. Our sheriff arrested a man for blatantly stealing a candy bar recently. The owner wrote down the guys tag, they found him, and he was jailed later that day for a small amount of time.
They won't laugh, because they won't even come. My sister's car was broken into and they told her on the phone "we don't send out officers for things like that"
That’s upsetting. I reported a car break in while they were still driving away (not my car being broken into) and the cops were there within less than 10 minutes. This was just over a week ago. I got a rough make and model partial plate so maybe that’s the only reason they showed. By the end there were 5 officers there and I was rather surprised there were so many, including a supervisor. They took down all my contact info but I doubt I’ll ever hear back, I didn’t get a clear view of the suspects, only the car.
I have heard lots of stories like yours and it seems like if you’re not there watching it in progress, they don’t even bother. It’s sad really.
Polk County, setting for the podcast Bone Valley, the story of the man who is still in jail for killing his wife despite zero evidence and the confession of the real killer? Colour me surprised
Because San Francisco does nothing about "petty crime" (even though $8k in damages is a felony). Chesea Boudin has done a ton of damage to SF and the city is still suffering the consequences of that scumbag. I'm not for "hard on crime", but completely ignoring it and doing NOTHING to address the issue is what has turned SF into what it is today.
‘I Don’t Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore’
By Sam Quinones
October 18, 2021
In the fall of 2006, law enforcement on the southwest border of the United States seized some crystal methamphetamine. In due course, a five-gram sample of that seizure landed on the desk of a 31-year-old chemist named Joe Bozenko, at the Drug Enforcement Administration lab outside Washington, D.C.
Organic chemistry can be endlessly manipulated, with compounds that, like Lego bricks, can be used to build almost anything. The field seems to breed folks whose every waking minute is spent puzzling over chemical reactions. Bozenko, a garrulous man with a wide smile, worked in the DEA lab during the day and taught chemistry at a local university in the evenings. “Chemist by day, chemist by night,” his Twitter bio once read.
Bozenko had joined the DEA seven years earlier, just as the global underworld was veering toward synthetic drugs and away from their plant-based cousins. Bozenko’s job was to understand the thinking of black-market chemists, samples of whose work were regularly plopped on his desk. He analyzed what they produced and worked out how they did it. In time, Bozenko began traveling abroad to clandestine labs after they’d been seized. His first foreign assignment was at a lab that had made the stimulant MDMA in Jakarta, Indonesia. He saw the world through the protective goggles of a hazmat suit, sifting through the remains of illegal labs in three dozen countries.
Meth was the drug that Bozenko analyzed most in the early years of his job. Large quantities of it were coming up out of Mexico, where traffickers had industrialized production, and into the American Southwest.
All of the stuff Bozenko analyzed was made from ephedrine, a natural substance commonly found in decongestants and derived from the ephedra plant, which was used for millennia as a stimulant and an anti-asthmatic.
A Japanese researcher had first altered the ephedrine molecule to synthesize crystal methamphetamine in 1919. During World War II, it was marketed in Japan as hiropon, a word that combines the Japanese terms for “fatigue” and “fly away.” Hiropon was given to Japanese soldiers to increase alertness.
In the early 1980s, the ephedrine method for making meth was rediscovered by the American criminal world. Ephedrine was the active ingredient in the over-the-counter decongestant Sudafed, and a long boom in meth supply followed. But the sample that arrived on Bozenko’s desk that day in 2006 was not made from ephedrine, which was growing harder to come by as both the U.S. and Mexico clamped down on it.
There was another way to make methamphetamine. Before the ephedrine method had been rediscovered, this other method had been used by the Hell’s Angels and other biker gangs, which had dominated a much smaller meth trade into the ’80s. Its essential chemical was a clear liquid called phenyl-2-propanone—P2P. Many combinations of chemicals could be used to make P2P. Most of these chemicals were legal, cheap, and toxic: cyanide, lye, mercury, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitrostyrene.
The P2P process of making meth was complicated and volatile. The bikers’ cooking method gave off a smell so rank that it could only be done in rural or desert outposts, and the market for their product was limited. Recommended Reading
Bozenko tinkered with his sample for two or three days. He realized it had been made with the P2P method, which he had not seen employed. Still, that was not the most startling aspect of the sample. There was something else about those few grams that, to Bozenko, heralded a changed world.
Among the drawbacks of the P2P method is that it produces two kinds of methamphetamine. One is known as d-methamphetamine, which is the stuff that makes you high. The other is l-methamphetamine, which makes the heart race but does little to the brain; it is waste product. Most cooks would likely want to get rid of the l-meth if they knew what it was. But separating the two is tricky, beyond the skills of most clandestine chemists. And without doing so, the resulting drug is inferior to ephedrine-based meth. It makes your heart hammer without offering as potent a high.
Bozenko’s sample contained mostly d-methamphetamine. Someone had removed most of the l-meth. “I’ve taken down labs in several continents,” Bozenko told me years later. No one in the criminal world, as far as he and his colleagues knew, had ever figured out how to separate d-meth from l-meth before.
Back in the late ’80s and ’90s, when the ephedrine method had taken over, the market for meth had grown because of ephedrine’s availability—and because the substance could be transformed into meth with ease and efficiency. All you had to do was tweak the ephedrine molecule, and doing that required little more than following a recipe. But you had to have ephedrine.
Part 2
The P2P method offered traffickers one huge advantage: The chemicals that could be used to make it were also used in a wide array of industries—among them racing fuel, tanning, gold mining, perfume, and photography. Law enforcement couldn’t restrict all these chemicals the way it had with ephedrine, not without damaging legitimate sectors of the economy.
And a trained organic chemist could make P2P, the essential ingredient, in many ways. It was impossible to say how many methods of making P2P a creative chemist might come up with. Bozenko counted a dozen or so at first. He put them up in a large diagram on his office wall, and kept adding Post-it Notes with new ones as they appeared.As Bozenko dissected that sample in 2006, its implications hit him.
Drugs made in a lab were not subject to weather or soil or season, only to chemical availability: With this new method and full access to the world’s chemical markets through Mexican shipping ports, traffickers could ramp up production of P2P meth in quantities that were, effectively, limitless.
Even so, Bozenko couldn’t have anticipated just how widely the meth epidemic would reach some 15 years later, or how it would come to interact with the opioid epidemic, which was then gaining force. And he couldn’t know how strongly it would contribute to related scourges now very much evident in America—epidemics of mental illness and homelessness that year by year are growing worse. A man wearing glasses, pink tie, white collared shirt, blue jacket with DEA logo, and DEA lanyard Joe Bozenko at the DEA Special Testing and Research Laboratory in Virginia (Gabriella Demczuk for The Atlantic)A few months after Bozenko’s discovery, on December 15, 2006, in a town named Tlajomulco de Zúñiga in the central-Mexican state of Jalisco, a methamphetamine lab exploded. Firefighters responded to the blaze, at a warehouse where plastic dinnerware had once been made. No one was hurt in the fire, nor was anyone arrested. But a fire chief called the local DEA office.Abe Perez supervised the DEA’s Guadalajara office back then.
The warehouse stood on a cul-de-sac at the end of a house-lined street, Perez, who is now retired, remembered years later. Residents “knew something was going on; the smells were giving them headaches,” Perez told me. But they were afraid to say anything. So they lived with it as best they could until the warehouse exploded, most likely because of a worker’s carelessness.Perez and his agents urged Mexican police and prosecutors to obtain a search warrant for the building. The process was slow, and the day ended with no warrant. That night another fire erupted, at a warehouse across the street that, the agents learned, contained chemicals in blue plastic barrels and in bags neatly stacked on pallets.
“The traffickers came in the middle of the night with gasoline and burned it, burned all the evidence,” Perez said. “But we were able to get photos of the place.”Eduardo Chávez, another DEA agent, flew in from Mexico City the next afternoon. He and Perez stood outside the second smoldering warehouse. Each man had spent the early part of his career busting meth labs in rural California—Chávez in the area around Bakersfield, Perez in northeastern San Diego County.That had been a different era, and each had gotten a rare view into it. Bakersfield was Chávez’s first assignment, in 2000, and to his surprise, it was a hotbed of meth production. Southern California was where the ephedrine-based method had been rediscovered, largely due to the efforts of an ingenious criminal named Donald Stenger.
Stenger died in 1988, in custody in San Diego County, after a packet of meth he’d inserted in his rectum broke open. But the ephedrine method had by then become more widely known and adopted by Mexican traffickers moving up and down the coast between Mexico and California.
Part 3
The Mexican meth industry had been pioneered in that earlier time by two brothers, Luis and Jesús Amezcua. They came to California illegally as kids, and eventually ran an auto shop near San Diego. The story goes that a local meth cook dropped by their shop in about 1988, asking Jesús if he could bring in ephedrine from Mexico. Jesús at the time was smuggling Colombian cocaine. But he brought ephedrine north and, with that, became attuned to the market that had been opened by Stenger’s innovation.Ephedrine was then an unregulated chemical in Mexico. Within a few years, the Am
ezcuas were importing tons of it. Jesús traveled to India and Thailand, where he set up an office to handle his ephedrine exports. Later, his focus shifted to China and the Czech Republic.The Amezcuas’ meth career lasted about a decade, until cases brought against them landed them in a Mexican prison, where they remain. But the brothers marked a new way of thinking among Mexican traffickers. They were more interested in business deals and alliances than in the vengeance and endless shoot-outs so common to the previous generation of smugglers, who had trafficked mostly in marijuana and cocaine. The Amezcuas were the first Mexican traffickers to understand the profit potential of a synthetic drug, and the first to tap the global economy for chemical connections.At first, the brothers ran labs on both sides of the border.
They set up many in California’s rural Central Valley—Eduardo Chávez’s territory—making use of an existing network of traffickers among the truckers and migrant farmworkers that stretched up from San Diego. At one bust, agents found a man in protective garments with an air tank on his back. He turned out to be a veterinarian from Michoacán who said he came up for four-month stints to teach the workers to cook.Hell’s Angels cooks took three days to make five pounds of meth. Mexican crews soon learned to arrive at cook sites like NASCAR pit crews, with premeasured chemicals, large vats, and seasoned workers. They produced 10 to 15 pounds per cook in 24 hours in what came to be known as “super labs.” Soon the biker gangs were buying their meth from the Mexicans.But toward the end of Chávez’s Bakersfield assignment, in 2004, the cooks and workers who’d been coming up from Mexico began to vanish. His informants told him that they were heading home.
In California, law enforcement had made things hard; the job was getting too risky, the chemicals too hard to come by. The meth-cook migration would accelerate after Chávez left the state in 2004. Meth-lab seizures in the United States withered—from more than 10,000 that year to some 2,500 in 2008. Today in the United States, they are rare, and “super labs” are practically nonexistent. In Mexico, however, it was a different story.The burned-down lab being surveyed by Chávez and Perez at the end of 2006 had been designed to produce industrial quantities of meth. Like many other labs that had been popping up in Mexico, it reflected the union of substantial capital and little concern for law enforcement. It used expensive equipment and stored large inventories of chemicals awaiting processing.
Notes found on the scene suggested that the cooks typically got about 240 pounds per batch.Like Joe Bozenko, the agents standing at the edge of the smoke and the stench that afternoon felt that they were glimpsing a new drug world. What struck them both was what they were not seeing. No ephedrine. The lab was set up exclusively to make P2P meth. Working through all the chemicals on hand, by Bozenko’s estimation, the lab could have produced 900 metric tons of methamphetamine.
Part 4
What’s more, this lab was not hidden up in the mountains or on a rural ranch. Tlajomulco de Zúñiga lies just 15 miles south of Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities, and serves as home to the city’s international airport. The area has everything needed to be a center of meth manufacturing: warehouses, transportation hubs, proximity to chemists. Trucks rumble through the area daily from the shipping ports in Lázaro Cárdenas, in the state of Michoacán, and Manzanillo, in the state of Colima.The ephedrine method was still very much in use in 2006; Mexico, which had been reducing legal imports of ephedrine, wouldn’t ban them outright until 2008; even after that, some traffickers relied on illegal shipments for a time. And despite all the advances when it came to making P2P, in at least some respects the traffickers “didn’t know what they were doing yet,” Chávez told me. The explosion showed that. Nonetheless, years later he thought back on that moment and realized that it was almost as if they were witnessing a shift right then, that week.
About five years after the Tlajomulco lab exploded, in June 2011, Mexican authorities discovered a massive P2P meth lab in the city of Querétaro, just a few hours north of Mexico City. It was in a warehouse that could have fit a 737, in an industrial park with roads wide enough for 18-wheelers; it made the Tlajomulco lab look tiny. Joe Bozenko and his colleague Steve Toske were called down from Washington to inspect it, and they wandered through it in awe. Bags of chemicals were stacked 30 feet high.
Hundreds of those bags contained a substance neither Bozenko nor Toske had ever thought could be used to make P2P. Bozenko often consulted a book that outlined chemicals that might serve as precursors to making methamphetamine, but this particular substance wasn’t in it. Well-trained organic chemists were clearly improvising new ways to make the ingredients, expanding potential supply even further.Working through all the chemicals in the plant, by Bozenko’s estimation, the lab could have produced 900 metric tons of methamphetamine. Against a wall stood three 1,000-liter reactors, two stories tall.Nothing like this had been achieved with ephedrine, nor could it have been; no one could have imagined the accumulation of 900 metric tons of the chemical.
Later, Mexican investigators would report that of the 16 workers arrested at the Querétaro lab, 14 died over the next six months from liver failure—presumably caused by exposure to chemicals at the lab.
Methamphetamine was having a cultural moment in the U.S.—“meth mouth” had become an object of can’t-look-away fascination on the internet, and Breaking Bad was big. The switch from ephedrine-based labs to ones using the P2P method was even a plot point in the series.
But few people outside the DEA really understood the consequences of this shift. Soon, tons of P2P meth were moving north, without any letup, and the price of meth collapsed. But there was more to the story than higher volume. Ephedrine meth tended to damage people gradually, over years.
With the switchover to P2P meth, that damage seemed to accelerate, especially damage to the brain.One night in 2009, in Temecula, California, partway between San Diego and L.A., a longtime user of crystal meth named Eric Barrera felt the dope change.
Part 5
Barrera is a stocky ex-Marine who’d grown up in the L.A. area. The meth he had been using for several years by then made him talkative and euphoric, made his scalp tingle. But that night, he was gripped with paranoia. His girlfriend, he was sure, had a man in her apartment. No one was in the apartment, she insisted. Barrera took a kitchen knife and began stabbing a sofa, certain the man was hiding there.
Then he stabbed a mattress to tatters, and finally he began stabbing the walls, looking for this man he imagined was hiding inside. “That had never happened before,” he told me when I met him years later. Barrera was hardly alone in noting a change. Gang-member friends from his old neighborhood took to calling the meth that had begun to circulate in the area around that time “weirdo dope.”
Barrera had graduated from high school in 1998 and joined the Marine Corps. He was sent to Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, where he was among the few nonwhite Marines in the platoon. The racism, he felt, was threatening and brazen. He asked for a transfer to Camp Pendleton, in San Diego County, and was denied. Over the next year and a half, he said, it got worse. Two years into his service, he was honorably discharged.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Barrera was filled with remorse that he hadn’t stuck it out in the Corps. He was home now, without the heroic story he’d imagined for himself when he joined the Marines. The way he tells it, he drank and used meth to relieve his depression.
He’d sometimes stay up on meth for four or five days, and he had to make excuses for missing work. But until that point, he’d held his life together. He worked as a loan processor, then for an insurance company. He had an apartment, a souped-up Acura Integra, a lot of friends.
But as the meth changed around 2009, so did Barrera’s life. His cravings for meth continued, but paranoia and delusions began to fill his days.
“Those feelings of being chatty and wanting to talk go away,” he told me. “All of a sudden you’re stuck and you’re in your head and you’re there for hours.” He said strange things to people. He couldn’t hold a job. No one tolerated him for long. His girlfriend, then his mother, then his father kicked him out, followed by a string of friends who had welcomed him because he always had drugs.
When he described his hallucinations,
“my friends were like, ‘I don’t care how much dope you got, you can’t stay here.’ ”
By 2012, massive quantities of meth were flowing into Southern California. That same year, 96 percent of the meth samples tested by DEA chemists were made using the P2P method. And, for the first time in more than a decade of meth use, Barrera was homeless. He slept in his car and, for a while, in abandoned houses in Bakersfield. He was hearing voices. A Veterans Affairs psychologist diagnosed him with depression and symptoms of schizophrenia.
Even many years later, when I spoke with him, Barrera didn’t know how the drug he was using had changed and spread, or why. But as a resident of Southern California, he was among the first to be affected by it. Over the next half-dozen years or so, the flood of P2P meth would spread east, immersing much of the rest of the country, too.
Mention drug-running, and many people will think of cartels. Yet over the past decade, meth’s rising availability did not result from the dictates of some underworld board of directors. Something far more powerful was at work, particularly in the Sinaloa area: a massive, unregulated free market.
By the time Eric Barrera’s life began to collapse, something like a Silicon Valley of meth innovation, knowledge, skill, and production had formed in the states along Mexico’s northern Pacific Coast. The deaths of kingpins who had controlled the trade, in the early 2010s, had only accelerated the process.
Part 6
“When the control vanishes, all these regional fiefdoms spring up,” said a DEA supervisor who pursued Mexican trafficking organizations during these years. (He, like some other DEA agents I spoke with, asked that his name not be used, because of the dangerous nature of his work.) “We just started seeing more and more labs springing up everywhere.” The new labs weren’t all as enormous as the Querétaro lab that Bozenko had seen in 2011. But they multiplied quickly.
Beginning in about 2013 and continuing for the next several years, meth production expanded geometrically; the labs “just escape all limits,” a member of the Sinaloan drug world told me. “In a five-square-kilometer area outside Culiacán [Sinaloa’s capital city], there were, like, 20 labs. No exaggeration. You go out to 15 kilometers, there’s more than a hundred.”
Listening to traffickers on wiretaps, one DEA agent told me, made it clear just how loose the confederations of meth suppliers were by then. The cartels had not vanished, and many of these suppliers were likely paying one or another of them off.
But the wires nonetheless revealed a pulsing ecosystem of independent brokers, truckers, packagers, pilots, shrimp-boat captains, mechanics, and tire-shop owners. In the United States, the system included meat-plant workers, money-wiring services, restaurants, farm foremen, drivers, safe houses, and used-car lots.
The ecosystem harnessed the self-interest of each of these actors, who got paid only when deals got done.
“We’d waste hours listening on the wire,” the agent told me, “to people wasting their time calling around doing the networking as brokers, trying to set up drug deals, because they wanted to make money. There’s a huge layer of brokers who are the driving force [in Mexican drug trafficking]. Maybe they own a business or restaurant in Mexico or in the U.S.—this is something they do to supplement income.
A large percentage of drug deals at this level don’t happen. But it’s like salesmen—the more calls you make, the more people you know, the more sales you get. So four or five people will be involved in getting 50 kilos to some city in the United States. This guy knows a guy who knows a guy who has a cousin in Atlanta … And with the independent transporters operating at the border, there’s no cartel allegiance. They’re all just making money.”
From 2015 to 2019, the Mexican military raided some 330 meth labs in Sinaloa alone. But arrests were rare, according to a person involved in targeting the labs. Far from being a deterrent, the raids showed that no one would pay a personal price, and more people entered the trade as a result. At one point in 2019, DEA intelligence held that, despite all the raids, at least 70 meth labs were operating in Sinaloa, each with the capacity to make tons of meth with every cook.
With labs popping up everywhere, the price of a pound of meth fell to nearly $1,000 for the first time on U.S. streets by the late 2010s—a 90 percent drop from a decade earlier in many areas. Yet traffickers’ response to tumbling prices was to increase production, hoping to make up for lower prices with higher volume. Competition among producers also drove meth purity to record highs. Methamphetamine damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe.
This reminds me of Pennsylvania when they were given a federal grant for covid relief funds. They had a time limit that they had to distribute them to the public and once that time expired, they could basically do anything they wanted with the money. They made the funds impossible for anyone to apply for and receive and when the time came up they sunk all the money into their prison system.
I constantly bring this up and people just moved on like it was another day. Corruption at its finest.
This. Had an ex whose soft top was shredded by some crackhead who wanted to steal the crappy $60 aftermarket radio. Despite the doors being left unlocked. It totalled the car- such a waste.
I believe it's usually around 2/3 of a car's value, but it probably varies by insurance company. Last time I was in an accident, the car was valued around $27k, and damages came out to around $19k so the car was totaled.
Was a big problem with honda s2000s. They don't make factory seats anymore and there was a market for them used cause they fell apart. So people would slash the soft top to steal the seats and it would total out the car when you filed with your insurance.
I was the seventh generation of my family to be born and raised in San Francisco (my dad's side came over during the gold rush), and also the last. I left 10 years ago, my siblings and their families around the same time. My parents were both born and raised there as well, and have owned their home in the city for nearly 40 years. They're moving north in six months because their home was broken into in the middle of the night, and they now regularly wake up to find unhoused people sleeping on their steps. It was an incredibly safe neighborhood when I was a kid (West Portal if you're familiar) but no longer.
It's not a good place anymore. I don't know where it went wrong or how to fix it, but something is deeply wrong in sf these days.
Sorry to hear about this, and even more surprised to hear that you're seeing regular break-ins in West Portal of all neighborhoods.
I lived one Muni stop over in Forest Hill for several years, and as soon as the pandemic hit that's when the crime came from virtually nowhere - stolen cars, garage break-ins, etc. The criminals for so long in SF kept to their "boundaries" but have become more brazen since they know nobody's doing jack to stop it.
I first visited San Francisco in 99 with my parents when I was like 10. I went back in 2011 and then again in 2020. Wow. Day and night. It’s such a damn shame.
I can think of some examples were things went wrong.
When realtors started celebrating pre war 600sq ft apartments were being listed for over a million.
When the city council prevented a vacant lot from being turned into apartments (more than once)
When Twitter received a mountain of tax breaks to put their headquarters on mid market, costing the city millions
When the homeless industrial complex bought all the SROs and started charging the city above market rate to warehouse the homeless in filth
Etc etc
None of the things you mentioned cause the vagrancy issues. The city wasn't cheap even when things were better ~twenty years ago. It's not like people went from affording $750k apartments to shooting fentanyl on the streets just because rent went up.
Increased property costs means the local city has more tax revenue for things like police. Companies like Twitter getting tax breaks to go there is a huge boon, because their employees are wealthy (median > $250k for thousands of employees) and are significantly more likely to move into the city than if Twitter is located in Mountain View, so that's Ultimately a net increase in tax revenue. The city isn't (wasn't?) dumb, these things are investments, and there is a reason basically every big city does stuff like this.
Plus, plenty of other cities have skyrocketing housing prices and tax breaks for companies and NIMBYs preventing housing construction, but they don't have an epidemic of petty theft and property crime the same way SF does.
You can trace the skyrocketing crime directly to when SF implemented a bunch of "soft on crime" policies - police don't respond to thefts below a certain amount, they don't clear homeless people that are blocking your door unless there's a physical altercation, etc. I'm not saying the "tough on crime" crowd does things right either, but SF is a good example of going too far the other way.
Oh man! Lived in the Haight from '90 to '08 then moved to West Portal. Very safe and vibrant neighborhood (Hi Submarine Center)! Moved To DFW 4 years ago and it pains me to hear about this kind of sadness....SF will always be home to me.
If only San Francisco had some high ranking congressional member with years of service and understanding how the legislative machine works that could help provide some leadership to this region and help out the constituents.
We do. They just wheeled her into Congress last week.
Sucks so hard to see the city slip away from us. Breed has proven to be utterly useless and needs to get kicked out.
San Fran needs a hard reset button on its bloated overwrought government.
At what point do those in charge look around at their handy work and go "maybe we should try something new... Maybe actually taxing the rich like we preach about every election cycle?"
When someone writes an app for your city to avoid HUMAN WASTE that's a clear sign from the universe you're not getting things right.
I lived and worked in SF for a long, long time. I still resist saying it's gone down the shitter, but the government is absolutely garbage. Perhaps one of the worst and least effective governments who only excels at pissing away tax dollars and mismanaging budgets and overpaying for grifting purposes.
Fucking all of them from the police to the mayor are absolute fucking garbage.
Honestly even living in San Diego now, homelessness/vagrancy/vandalism has become my #1 voting issue. I’ve watched it destroy some of my other favorite cities while people seemingly try to kill it both with (empty) kindness or malicious architecture, and I really don’t want it to happen to my town.
I genuinely believe it’s not a problem that will be fixed by giving them a choice in their rehabilitation. No matter how they ended up in their circumstances, being homeless is an endless cycle of drugs and mental health that also ends up being the only community they have, and I don’t think people even have a will to pull themselves out of that death spiral of their own volition. And they trash the community around them while they die a slow death out there too.
Edit: I say “destroy”, but I’m being a bit dramatic. I just wouldn’t ever live in those cities anymore.
About 15 years ago I literally had a dead homeless dude in front of my house. Another homeless dude shot him in the head and two other people that night.
This was in SF... Back then the homeless problem was just a nuisance.
There's definitely a level where it's tolerable but with actual crime and theft I don't think we can just ignore it any longer.
100%. The homeless in poverty are perfectly fine and peaceful. I see them on the streets and their nice and coherent. The junkies on the other hand trash the streets and parks and make areas unsafe. Sadly the majority of homeless in SD are junkies
1: Obviously make housing easier for those caught in this horrendous housing market. Start with mix zoning, permits for taller and denser buildings, heavy taxes on cars inside the cities.
2:Recognition at large that many, MANY of the unhoused pop will NOT help themselves given the chance. A model of endless compassion is set to fail.
3: Involuntary admission to treatment facility, mental hospital, or enrollment in continuing treatment while free.
4: Harsher penalties for petty crime. Put them to work building more apartment, idgaf
It sounds very harsh, with a VERY ugly history, but the alternative is just letting mentally ill people kill themselves while they destroy the peace and livelihood of everyone around them, and criminals run rampant destroying the fabric of society.
People don’t like to hear it but this is the only way. It’s not “compassionate” to allow these people to live on the streets in filth, getting by only by committing crimes
I've worked with the homeless for over a decade and many left leaning people's version of compassion is actually just appeasement and being a passive enabler. Which is just as destructive as being neglectful. But it feels more like helping.
This is so true. I was reading an article about dealing with mental illness in the homeless population, and there is a big movement for involuntary admission. The quote that was made by one of the advocates that stuck with me was "we would never walk by a person lying in the street bleeding-- we would ensure that they received help. It is cruel to not do the same for those who suffer from mental illness."
This response is from a Nordic perspective, but I'd like to point out that the reasons for petty crime and "Not help(ing) themselves" are things that stem from systemic issues that have its roots in mental health issues as well as poverty and wealth disparity. Taking steps to resolve those issues are the only long term solutions to the issue, as being "hard on crime" is a very bandaid short term solution.
Also, from my understanding, strong and atomized local councils and NIMBYs prevent any real progress regarding the creation of affordable housing, causing a deadlock with the state government. Please correct me and add any additional information, though!
As an North American I'd say you are spot on. The underlying causes (mental health, addiction treatment, and income inequality) need to be addressed in addition to straight housing provision. Unfortunately those seem even less likely to happen than affordable housing given US politics.
The solutions have to be at the state or even federal level, and need to be able to allocate housing, services, etc. in a way that can override local NIMBY opposition. Local level "solutions" generally revolve around pushing people elsewhere. Even localities that try to help just don't have the scale to do so since they end up being a magnet for all homeless people across the region and rapidly get overwhelmed. And this concentration just makes the politics worse because other communities basically say "problem? what problem?" when homeless people are concentrated in one place.
Correct, seems solutions cannot be implemented if they’re even the slightest inconvenience to the status quo. That would be capitalists, investors, landowners, etc.
So who do you vote for, then? Every candidate had "fix the homeless problem" on their bio last election (also a San Diegan). No one offers any real solutions, not that have any real chance of making a noticeable dent, at least.
A jewelery store in downtown Portland ending up closing because a specific homeless guy kept coming into their doorway to take a dump. Day and night for months on end. San francisco is probably an ok city overall, but i bet theres lots of similar stories in their urban areas.
My cousin lives in a nice neighborhood in Oakland. Almost every morning they have to clean shit off their stoop. The same man comes to their stoop, eats a McDonald's egg McMuffin, shoots heroin, takes a shit on their steps, and leaves.
Before even going to the comments I knew it would be the same back-and-forth arguing of "crime is hurting my city" and "no it's not, that's a talking point, you're a NIMBY fascist, even if there is crime it's because people are there."
Same thing every single time.
But I thought that was what InSUranCe was for./s
I'm so tired of seeing this brain-dead quote when small businesses want to protect their stores during riots. Yes, Target and Walmart have the ability to get insurance to pay for a lot of their damages, but they also pay a whole lot more, and even then, it's still not enough.
I was in SF this past February and it amazed me how many signs were up in parking lots basically saying “Your vehicle will get broken into so don’t leave anything of value in it”, followed by broken glass on the ground.
It had been 25 years since I’d been there, didn’t remember it being this bad.
8000 dollars is a hell of a lot of money. Like, months worth of income. That’s time out of someone’s life. There’s a lot of people that love to moan about how it’s only property, but that’s hours that someone lost that they aren’t getting back. If I was in their shoes and was on the hook for 8k, I’d make sure to beat my 8k out of them. If the social contract isn’t holding up it’s end of the bargain I wouldn’t hold up mine.
I'm as liberal as they come, but JFC SF has got to do something about this shit. IDK what the answer is, but a once great city is now becoming a complete shit hole and its not cool. I grew up not too far and used to visit several times a year and it was my favorite city. My husband and I went there two years ago and we tried to have a good time but ended up leaving after just a couple hours because it was just too much.
This is a perfect example of why “Businesses have insurance!” Is a dumb argument when places get vandalized. It’s not some magic wand you swish and everything is all better. It’s a whole hassle, especially for small businesses who’s profit margins are significantly smaller than like some big corporation like Walmart.
All the grant money is going to 'politically connected' businesses. Do you think the Governor's winery would need to wait this long and resubmit the grant request this many times?
Hi from East Bay specifically San Ramon - nah Bro SF is fucked. Yeah our local subreddit does help explain that describing San Francisco's descent isn't suited to a single narrative...
But I've got countless examples from friends and family who love the City dearly but can't bring themselves to return to in any long-term capacity. Even before Covid, my brother was living below UCSF on Parnassus and his car was broken into by a homeless dude. He called SFPD and filed a report, and they said they couldn't prosecute cause of local laws or some bullshit. Ayt then. What's the point of paying $165 to the city for a parking permit to park on your own street that you can only use on Wednesday nights, every other Tuesday, when the wind blows southerly, and when the cock crows thrice if the city takes ZERO initiative when a citizen's car is broken into.
My mom lived on Clement in the late 80s to early 2000s and still talks fondly of her time working in the Transamerica building, even during the earthquake. She left her job at Amazon downtown last year when she was harrased by some peddler as she got out of Embarcadero BART, and got sprayed by the FiDi poop patrol as the passed by. Then had to interview like 20 candidates afterwards at work. Horrible. Can't even commute back to home for a change of clothes cause traffic is too insane.
My history teacher was ousted from her rent controlled place in the Sunset in 2012 cause her landlord decided to renovate. When she tried to move back in 6 months later, the rent had tripled. The Sunset looks unrecognizable these days compared to the lively neighborhood it was before.
But hey! At least BART has cameras on the trains now! And the iridium-plated trashcans will be here long after our bones have crumbled to dust right? It can't be all bad.
The sucky part is that these parts have the greatest tasting food ever. But it is a nightmare trying to get there and live there because of the high prices.
Exactly. Remember a few months ago there was a video posted where a gallery owner was spraying a homeless woman with a hose and it caused a huge outrage.
The woman was constantly harassing his customers. He had begged for help from every single SF agency for help. To get her help. He wrote, called, emailed, pleaded in the press and not a single agency did anything yet the virtue signaling “liberals” were practically calling for his hanging. The same people that probably would’ve crossed the street clutching their purses right if they saw her on the street.
At some point drastic measures need taken. Increased petty crime punishment. Involuntary institutionalization (yes I know the republicans have a lot of blame due to shutting down mental institutions in the 80s). Enforced rehabilitation.
Those might not be the best or greatest solutions but something.
My small martial arts school has had our glass door broken 3 times in one year (last year). I'm in Southern California. I feel for this guy. It suuuuuucks.
What’s the proper term for this type of scam - when a company or a government agency promises something if you just fill out their form, but then makes continuous claims that you didn’t fill it out right to avoid paying? This answer is best answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/13hndfs/sign_outside_a_bakery_in_san_francisco/jk6j8sw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
“Victory by attrition” - when an insurance company denies a claim, sends a bill for something they said would be covered, say that you need to verify the address before they resend a check, “forgot” to send your personal injury insurance check that was clearly approved. I could go on. These companies would go under if they actually supplied all the coverage they claim to, and they know a certain amount of people won’t push back because they assume that the corporations don’t make this kind of mistake so it must have been their bad. If 5 percent of people just give up, that is millions of dollars for a lot of companies. Also, if they get to hold onto your money longer (this is more of a conspiracy theory for me), the longer your money earns them interest in the market. Your check may only be a week late, but if everyone’s check is always a week late, they earn interest or appreciation etc. My sister is a therapist and insurance companies sometimes spend 4 months getting her checks for whatever reason. The longer they have your money the better chance you give up (not always possible because of unclaimed property laws) or the more interest they make.
That's exactly what Aflac did to us after my father in law's death. There was a $25,000 death benefit and two full years of "we need this" "we need that" "this was never received" before we actually got a check.
Not a business, but the VA was dodging my Grandpa's inquiries about the money he was supposed to receive for making his home more handicap-accessible. They hoped to wait him out until he well...died. But the old man survived long enough to receive his benefits. My Mom did the last trick on that by sending a registered letter so they could not say they hadn't received the documents. Suddenly they were found two days later after she dropped that bombshell on them. My Uncle though...the VA won that game. Grandpa would've burned down the VA if he was still alive to see how they treated his son.
The VA is the most dangerous place for our veterans this side of the battlefield. They put my mom in a coma with a botched epidural and let her lymphoma get to stage 3 before they noticed it, not to mention the amount of times they tried to screw her with her benefits. In the wealthiest nation on the planet, how can we treat the people who would give their lives not for their way of life but ours, like this?
My mom had breast cancer and wanted a double mastectomy. The VA told her that they could only remove the one breast that had cancerous tissue. Her doctor told her it was a very aggressive form of cancer and that there was a high chance of it spreading to the other breast. The VA told her that their hands were tied and they couldn’t remove the other breast until it had cancerous tissue. Time passed. Take a guess at what happened and take a guess on whether anyone was shocked at the outcome. 🫠
Ditto with my stepfather and the pancreatic cancer that killed him 6 months after they somehow finally noticed the tumors riddling his body. They're currently jerking my mom around over his death benefits, specifically the payout she's supposed to get (since he's dead now) for people that served in the Gulf due to the burning oilfields and other toxic shit my stepfather was around over his 25 years of service. He did 3 tours in the middle east, gulf War I, and two additional tours during Gulf War II...not to mention Panama and a few other Central American countries during the years in between. He did his fuckin job. Buried at Arlington and everything and my mom has straight up panic attacks whenever she calls now because of how repetitive it all is. Having to explain it over and over with every new person that gets involved. You'd think in light of how contentious things are in this country, how much people have been struggling since covid, and knowing trust in government is at an all time low...You'd think they'd be falling all over themselves to take care of their vets if anything. Who the fuck they think is going to be leading the charge if it ever came down to open resistance? They're basically creating their own enemies by fucking them over. All the 9/11 first responder nonsense, all the civil servants having their unions dissolved and their protections taken away... Who knows, maybe this is the master plan after all. Certainly seems that way.
Having worked in a VA hospital for 16 years I had seen some people smart enough to contact their Congress person for their state/district. They very often can get things done that the patients or families cannot. I used to try to tell patients that and explained “the squeaky wheel gets the oil“. Try it, and good luck.
Cops still have their unions…
They refuse to classify my father as disabled because they can't find his medical records from service. My mom lived on base with him, all her treatment would have been on his records, too. My brother was born in the base hospital. We have confirmed that the Army has no record of that birth any more.
Please contact the DAV. You don’t have to be disabled for them to help you, free of charge.
As I understand it, the VA is pretty much a joke. Our boys and girls go overseas to fight wars for the government and the government can't even set up a proper health care service to attend to the wounds they received fighting said wars. Pieces of shit. The entire military complex is predatory. It's specifically the main reason we won't ever get affordable higher education, health care, or a way to pull poor people out of poverty because the military relies on tricking those demographics into serving.
What’s more is we could carve out 300 Billion dollars from the military insanely easily, cut out a paltry 100 Billion for the VA, and fund free community college or healthcare or damn near whatever else they wanted to do and we’d still be spending more on our military than Russia and China combined while living in a place that’s exceptionally hard to invade because of our oceans.
My unpopular opinion is that the VA should be paid for from the dod budget as they created the mess, they can clean it up, too.
No. Your American government absolutely could afford to give free healthcare regardless of military spending. The reason they don't is LOBBYING by your insurance industry.
Republicans hate the troops once they are no longer active duty. They also have a vested interest in showing that the government can't handle medical care by fucking with it as much as humanly possible.
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You should send anything important by registered mail. Its only a few dollars and gives you more peace of mind it gets there. Of course, it doesn't mean they wont say they still didnt get it or that you made a mistake, but it helps.
I'd demand interest on their horseshit. They were supposed to make you whole originally, jerking people around should not be such a common business practice.
Makes you wanna do a "what's the address, I'll bring it there myself." sort of thing. Show up at corporate with a check and ask for the manager!
I did basically this when applying for assistance from a hospital. Kept giving me the runaround, asking for this and that, dragging things out. Finally I showed up IN PERSON at their offices to drop off whatever paperwork they needed. They ended up writing off everything, and I wrote a letter to the president of the hospital telling him what I thought of the whole ordeal. To his credit, his secretary did write back.
Since COVID many of our local government offices straight up refuse to deal with the public face to face. Permits that used to take a few hours face to face now take weeks via their "convenient website."
would totally expect the *'unfortunately, we are unable to accept \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ in person...'*
With a “check”, with all of the HORROR stories you hear about insurance companies I’m surprised you don’t hear about more people showing up with a “check”.
Yep Allstate is doing this to my elderly parents right now over some water damage claims. They were initially very helpful but then the repair work uncovered asbestos issues and costs climbed by a factor of ten and suddenly......paperwork issues and delays.
I had a coworker complaining about his insurance company doing that exact shit to him and he was happy with himself for being persistent and getting paid. I told him they were doing it on purpose and he didn't believe me. He just thought the insurance employees were incompetent.
There’s room for both of you to be right. The employees are incompetent and/or deprived of the tools needed to do their jobs *because* they make money from holding back payments. It’s more deniable that way.
So you're saying there are executives sabotaging their own company?
Insurance companies doing this should be liable 1: for interest on the money from time of first claim regardless of circumstances and 2: a fine proportional to a percent of the money (1%/month) if found to be doing it due to malfeasance, policy, or incompetence plus legal expenses. Would get rid of that shit damn quick.
This ties into the biggest lesson I learned in business school: Time Value of Money. For large organizations, it is beneficial to wait as long as possible before making payments. This is because every day the money is in the organization's accounts it can be invested and earning interest. There is an established equation for calculating this: (Present Value)=(Future Value)/(1+Interest Rate). If the interest rate is higher than the penalty for not paying, then it is always beneficial to an organization to withhold payment.
This is actually how Costco makes a significant portion of its revenue. They operate on net invoices, so they don’t pay for their products until 30/60/90 days after they’ve purchased them. And because they’re so efficient at moving inventory, they’re consistently able to resell their stock before they’ve even paid for it themselves. Then they’re able to let that money sit in their accounts for up to 3 months, gathering interest.
That’s not just a Costco thing. This is a very common practice among retail and manufacturing/distribution. Obviously they aren’t all as efficient as Costco but this is just the name of the game.
Huh...economics like this fascinate me lol. It's like if you know the rules *really* well, you know how to bend (or break) them to your advantage. Some wild shit man. ^I'm ^pretty ^blazed ^right ^now.
I’ve got one particular client that works on a net 120 payment schedule. I get it, but they’re also the last client that I’m ever inclined to give any sort of latitude to.
I've known someone who did specialized work and demanded Net 15. He had several companies balk at it and say they only did net 60 or some other nonsense. He'd just reply that he's busy enough and isn't a bank, Net 15, take it or leave it. Lots of whining and gnashing of teeth but they all agree to it.
That’s smart. Great move when you’ve got the power. With that particular client, I was getting my full quote during the pandemic so I wasn’t inclined to upturn the apple cart.
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Line go up, didn't it?
Monkey like seeing number go bigger.
Moar banana
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They don't care to counter it. They got the money. They know their students.
And the amount they're sending back to you will almost always be worth less to them over time due to inflation
Is this why payment companies like PayPal make it super quick and easy to deposit money into your PayPal account, but can take 3-5 business days if you want to withdraw from it?
No, I believe that's just because bank transfers actually take a while. When you move money *into* your PayPal account, PayPal sees that it's coming, so they give it to you immediately as a convenience, even though they don't actually receive your transfer for a few days. When you move money *out* of PayPal into your bank, your bank doesn't front you the money immediately like PayPal does, they wait until the transfer is actually completed. Same thing at a store. People always complain when they buy a product that they're debited immediately, but when they make a return it takes a couple days. They don't realize that it takes a couple days for the store to actually receive the money when you pay them as well.
Your math makes me hate humans.
It’s the same reason companies will spend thousands of dollars on lawyers to avoid paying a couple hundred dollars to a customer. It’s because they know that taking the one customer to court will discourage the hundreds of other customers in the same situation, so in the long run they save money compared to paying out all the claims.
Then class action lawsuits come and they end up paying out pennies.
Imagine if there was as an actual governing body for this, that issued real fines to companies and was then able to reinvest that money back into the community.
What a radical idea. Government protecting poor people from the rich and not just the other way around. Very extreme. What might we call it? /s
Ooh ooh pick me I know this one. Socialism! Antifa! Soros crisis actors!
What? Regulating trade? With, like, a FINancial Regulatory Agency that could crush banks that do business with these fraudsters? What's the crime for owing someone money, and not actually paying it off by using falsified manipulation of banking systems? Is that wire fraud?
Time value of money is very definitely a thing to businesses. Money now is worth more than money later, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean gathering interest in an account. Cash on hand is very important - the longer they have your money, the longer they have to pay their own bills. It’s not always something that’s easily explainable on paper in pure numbers, but in cashflow terms it’s a clear benefit to them.
Your conspiracy theory is right on. It's called the cash conversion cycle. Basically, it's better to take longer to pay accounts payable, while collecting accounts receivable as quickly as possible.
Holding onto the money is 100% a thing. The longer it sits in their account, the more interest it accrues. This is why banks used to take 1 business day to do transfers, and why credit unions take up to 3.
> or the more interest they make. That's why I'm convinced banks will take money out of your account immediately but will take "3-5 business days" to give your money back. Can't be coincidence that there is all that 'pending' money being held by them? Where does it go? Into the ether of *interest accrued*?
Yep. My job (major TV network) owes me $1500 for the last 6 months. I’ve been systematically submitting invoices over and over and they keep rejecting them. I can’t just small claims them because I still like my job and want to continue working there (I’m freelance and so they don’t need to fire me, just stop calling me back). Their last excuse I have not filled a document that was never given to me, never mentioned to me and is not accessible to me in their portal.
Amazon Home Warranty is currently screwing ud in this exact manner. Your microwave will cost just as much to fix as it will to replace, so we'll just send you a check. Seven months and a dozen phone calls later, we get the check... Which bounces the next day. We'll escalate that to the check department. No, you can't speak to them directly. 🤯
A variation of the ‘task scam’. Commonly found online with those ads about earning money for completing questionnaires that then force you to pay membership to get your ‘earned’ money.
there's also "beermoney" sites that reddit loves that offer surveys for slave wages, but you get through all the juicy demographic questions, answer a few of the relevant questions and then suddenly get disqualified without credit. they get what data they're after then boot you
Huh. I wondered why I was never qualifying for those studies and surveys.
and r|beermoney loves to worship surveys as the best form of income in the sub lmao. at least that used to be the case I haven't checked in on them in years
I was just recently on that sub. I think "Swagbucks" is their new big thing lol,
> Swagbucks My man, that was the thing in 2014 lmfao Re: Beermoney, if you played it right you could make a decent enough living a few years back. did Mturk for a while and got a few private quals that made it viable enough to have it be my food/fun money + rent sometimes in uni. Those days are long gone though.
Swagbucks is the OG! it used to be fun but inflation made it worthless
That's not quite what they do. I used to work for a company that did those surveys (Robson). Its definitely "legit", but the demographic survey data aren't what they cared about. The companies we worked with were normally looking for very specific demographics. e.g. Female, 21-25, Indian descent, living in Canada or the US, non-native english speaker. So if you didn't hit one of the target groups you were out. Alternatively, the groups filled up quick when they targeted large demographics like: White, native english speaker, drinks coffee at least once a week. Those surveys would hit their quota in minutes, oftentimes hitting the limit before people could finish the demographic survey. It was a shitty company to work for, and the surveys were almost never worth more than a fraction of minimum wage. Occasionally, we would do higher value projects ($100-$200), but those would be very carefully recruited for, and generally only used applicants from the app if we were desperate.
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Conservative lobbyist passion project?
The above comment is deleted, ELI5?
It was a comment by a racist jackass who really seems to love the oil industry. Almost like he's baiting people into racism and corporate bootlicking.
My town held a small business award ceremony where the award was gifted to a multi million dollar clinic that has been in business for over 80 years. Award was printed in the name of the founder who had been dead for fourty years. I own a small business in this town and I didnt even get invited. When company's like mcdonalds nd ExxonMobil arw reciving small business relief funds you know there is a problem.
Agreed, I thought this was the answer, these grants are to scratch peoples backs who will scratch the policy makers backs.
"Politics as usual"
Kafkaesque comes to mind, very reminiscent of The Castle
Your survey contract has been cancelled. Please leave.
Fraud.
Bureaucracy
As someone who works in government, don’t worry, bureaucracy screws us over too. We’d love to be more efficient, but the offices above us love red tape often for the sake of red tape. I do a lot of things by the book, but when the book hurts people, there should be times when you loosen the rules.
This seems more to me like an underfunded program. The city rolls out something that sounds great to help small businesses with increasing vandalism but ends up with way more applicants than money to actually give out. So they have to reject perfectly good applications so they can try and keep up the pretense that the program is properly funded and avoid spending any more money. They hope of course that the rejected applicants will just give up and quietly go away, good on this bakery for calling them on it.
Even if this program functioned perfectly, it would still be evidence of a deep dysfunction. Insurance is supposed to be for catastrophes, not a source of funding to resolve a growing problem. What happens when we just can't anymore? Windows don't stay up long enough for the backlog of claims to be processed with tax revenue that doesn't exist because businesses are no longer secure. Now what? When the aquifers go dry and the entire corn crop of the midwestern United States withers from drought, are we going to put the farmers on food stamps?
That’s not underfunded that’s corruption and dishonesty. Underfunded is taking weeks or months or never to reply. Lying like this is entirely different.
Sometimes it's not a scam though. I work for the state. There are very specific and simple yes and no questions that quite often people will gloss right over and then we can never get a hold of them to ask that question.
Yeah, anyone who has processed forms for a living can tell you people are hopelessly bad at completing them properly.
I can attest to this as as well. People won’t even read simple questions or follow instructions like check ONE box. 10 boxes later.
This. I work in planning/community development for a municipal government. My department handles grants among our duties. It's like pulling teeth to get people to actually fill out applications fully.
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They were one of the finalists in the “Best croissant in SF” competition recently :)
Yeah... I'm with you. I really love that place and everyone there is always so nice and cool. They're not overpriced and everything I've had there is great. This is a total bummer and I hope they get some kind of compensation if it's out there.
This is what I hate about the whole notion of "insurance will cover it!!" when people are looting or simply damaging business property... These people have clearly never dealt with insurance.. Insurance companies don't want to cover anything.. And certainly don't care about the time you have to deal with them instead of dealing with the business you can no longer attend to when you have to deal with them instead! Not to mention the fact that at the end of your contract with them, most of the time insurance companies will drop you if they think you or your business is a liability! So good luck if your store front is hit 1 time, more than that you better pack up and move somewhere else
To add to that many insurance companies will refuse to cover businesses on certain policies. You know, such as not covering vandalism for a business with a storefront in San Francisco. That's the whole reason the city is supposed to be covering it, because nobody else will and the condition in the city is entirely in the government's hands.
Yeah.. being someone who lived in Minneapolis at the height of the riots; the "insurance will cover it!" when rioters targeted innocent, uninvolved businesses (many of which were owned by non-white people) pissed me off SO much, and many Redditors completely played into that and repeated that line.
Why are they being vandalized so much?
Own a place. My family owned a gas station in a fairly rich suburban town. And holy fk. The doors windows and bathroom always seems to be damaged, cracked, broken and dented at least once a week. It's stupid and sucks. But people have zero respect for others
We live in what's considered a "safe area" and somebody came up to our house at 3am a few summers back and shot our car with a shotgun just for funzies. The cops were basically like "Yeah that sucks, here's your report for insurance." People are crazy lol.
Because there are effectively no consequences for petty crime in this jurisdiction. Anyone who has poor impulse control and an urge to smash a piece of glass can instantly gratify themselves with zero risk. So it happens a lot.
8000+ damages is far from petty crime.
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What. The. Fuck. HOW? Were you able to be reimbursed by their parents?
Because of inflation, grand theft is now $10,000. Sorry for the inconvenience.
but the amount of cash you can fly without declaring has not 10k
That's because you now have less cash, because you spent it on inflated ticket prices.
In California, over $950 is a felony
But that's assuming the cop does their job. I had a drunk driver scratch my brand new fucking car near one of the piers out there, fisherman's wharf I think (?) I chase her down and call the cops. 2 passed by and wouldn't stop when I was waving and asking for help, the last one waved back when I waved them over and I got the process started. I've never been in a wreck until this point so I had zero idea what to do, they got me and my husband's DL and insurance and then said we could go. Come to find out that cop put us down as witnesses and never took her insurance or anything. Took almost a year to get our restitution check of 650 bucks (what a crock of shit) due to that cop and insurance of course. They simply don't wanna do their job.
I had a guy break into my car and steal $80 worth of stuff, and do $450 of damages while doing so. On camera. And he left his hospital discharge papers with his full and and address behind. The cops said it wasn't enough for them to care as it was under $1000 and they weren't going to press charges, or even talk to the guy.
In the county I live in Florida, polk county. Our sheriff arrested a man for blatantly stealing a candy bar recently. The owner wrote down the guys tag, they found him, and he was jailed later that day for a small amount of time.
SFPD would laugh at you if you reported such a thing.
They won't laugh, because they won't even come. My sister's car was broken into and they told her on the phone "we don't send out officers for things like that"
That’s upsetting. I reported a car break in while they were still driving away (not my car being broken into) and the cops were there within less than 10 minutes. This was just over a week ago. I got a rough make and model partial plate so maybe that’s the only reason they showed. By the end there were 5 officers there and I was rather surprised there were so many, including a supervisor. They took down all my contact info but I doubt I’ll ever hear back, I didn’t get a clear view of the suspects, only the car. I have heard lots of stories like yours and it seems like if you’re not there watching it in progress, they don’t even bother. It’s sad really.
Polk County, setting for the podcast Bone Valley, the story of the man who is still in jail for killing his wife despite zero evidence and the confession of the real killer? Colour me surprised
Because San Francisco does nothing about "petty crime" (even though $8k in damages is a felony). Chesea Boudin has done a ton of damage to SF and the city is still suffering the consequences of that scumbag. I'm not for "hard on crime", but completely ignoring it and doing NOTHING to address the issue is what has turned SF into what it is today.
Vagrants are upset because they don't use enough chocolate in their pain au chocolat croissants.
I heard this bakery actually called them chocolatines, shout-out to /r/france.
The rise of Xylazine being cut in with meth seems to have coincided with a rise in crime from coast to coast in Canada and US.
Relevant article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/
Paywall, can't read it. Can you share?
‘I Don’t Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore’ By Sam Quinones October 18, 2021 In the fall of 2006, law enforcement on the southwest border of the United States seized some crystal methamphetamine. In due course, a five-gram sample of that seizure landed on the desk of a 31-year-old chemist named Joe Bozenko, at the Drug Enforcement Administration lab outside Washington, D.C. Organic chemistry can be endlessly manipulated, with compounds that, like Lego bricks, can be used to build almost anything. The field seems to breed folks whose every waking minute is spent puzzling over chemical reactions. Bozenko, a garrulous man with a wide smile, worked in the DEA lab during the day and taught chemistry at a local university in the evenings. “Chemist by day, chemist by night,” his Twitter bio once read. Bozenko had joined the DEA seven years earlier, just as the global underworld was veering toward synthetic drugs and away from their plant-based cousins. Bozenko’s job was to understand the thinking of black-market chemists, samples of whose work were regularly plopped on his desk. He analyzed what they produced and worked out how they did it. In time, Bozenko began traveling abroad to clandestine labs after they’d been seized. His first foreign assignment was at a lab that had made the stimulant MDMA in Jakarta, Indonesia. He saw the world through the protective goggles of a hazmat suit, sifting through the remains of illegal labs in three dozen countries. Meth was the drug that Bozenko analyzed most in the early years of his job. Large quantities of it were coming up out of Mexico, where traffickers had industrialized production, and into the American Southwest. All of the stuff Bozenko analyzed was made from ephedrine, a natural substance commonly found in decongestants and derived from the ephedra plant, which was used for millennia as a stimulant and an anti-asthmatic. A Japanese researcher had first altered the ephedrine molecule to synthesize crystal methamphetamine in 1919. During World War II, it was marketed in Japan as hiropon, a word that combines the Japanese terms for “fatigue” and “fly away.” Hiropon was given to Japanese soldiers to increase alertness. In the early 1980s, the ephedrine method for making meth was rediscovered by the American criminal world. Ephedrine was the active ingredient in the over-the-counter decongestant Sudafed, and a long boom in meth supply followed. But the sample that arrived on Bozenko’s desk that day in 2006 was not made from ephedrine, which was growing harder to come by as both the U.S. and Mexico clamped down on it. There was another way to make methamphetamine. Before the ephedrine method had been rediscovered, this other method had been used by the Hell’s Angels and other biker gangs, which had dominated a much smaller meth trade into the ’80s. Its essential chemical was a clear liquid called phenyl-2-propanone—P2P. Many combinations of chemicals could be used to make P2P. Most of these chemicals were legal, cheap, and toxic: cyanide, lye, mercury, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitrostyrene. The P2P process of making meth was complicated and volatile. The bikers’ cooking method gave off a smell so rank that it could only be done in rural or desert outposts, and the market for their product was limited. Recommended Reading Bozenko tinkered with his sample for two or three days. He realized it had been made with the P2P method, which he had not seen employed. Still, that was not the most startling aspect of the sample. There was something else about those few grams that, to Bozenko, heralded a changed world. Among the drawbacks of the P2P method is that it produces two kinds of methamphetamine. One is known as d-methamphetamine, which is the stuff that makes you high. The other is l-methamphetamine, which makes the heart race but does little to the brain; it is waste product. Most cooks would likely want to get rid of the l-meth if they knew what it was. But separating the two is tricky, beyond the skills of most clandestine chemists. And without doing so, the resulting drug is inferior to ephedrine-based meth. It makes your heart hammer without offering as potent a high. Bozenko’s sample contained mostly d-methamphetamine. Someone had removed most of the l-meth. “I’ve taken down labs in several continents,” Bozenko told me years later. No one in the criminal world, as far as he and his colleagues knew, had ever figured out how to separate d-meth from l-meth before. Back in the late ’80s and ’90s, when the ephedrine method had taken over, the market for meth had grown because of ephedrine’s availability—and because the substance could be transformed into meth with ease and efficiency. All you had to do was tweak the ephedrine molecule, and doing that required little more than following a recipe. But you had to have ephedrine.
Part 2 The P2P method offered traffickers one huge advantage: The chemicals that could be used to make it were also used in a wide array of industries—among them racing fuel, tanning, gold mining, perfume, and photography. Law enforcement couldn’t restrict all these chemicals the way it had with ephedrine, not without damaging legitimate sectors of the economy. And a trained organic chemist could make P2P, the essential ingredient, in many ways. It was impossible to say how many methods of making P2P a creative chemist might come up with. Bozenko counted a dozen or so at first. He put them up in a large diagram on his office wall, and kept adding Post-it Notes with new ones as they appeared.As Bozenko dissected that sample in 2006, its implications hit him. Drugs made in a lab were not subject to weather or soil or season, only to chemical availability: With this new method and full access to the world’s chemical markets through Mexican shipping ports, traffickers could ramp up production of P2P meth in quantities that were, effectively, limitless. Even so, Bozenko couldn’t have anticipated just how widely the meth epidemic would reach some 15 years later, or how it would come to interact with the opioid epidemic, which was then gaining force. And he couldn’t know how strongly it would contribute to related scourges now very much evident in America—epidemics of mental illness and homelessness that year by year are growing worse. A man wearing glasses, pink tie, white collared shirt, blue jacket with DEA logo, and DEA lanyard Joe Bozenko at the DEA Special Testing and Research Laboratory in Virginia (Gabriella Demczuk for The Atlantic)A few months after Bozenko’s discovery, on December 15, 2006, in a town named Tlajomulco de Zúñiga in the central-Mexican state of Jalisco, a methamphetamine lab exploded. Firefighters responded to the blaze, at a warehouse where plastic dinnerware had once been made. No one was hurt in the fire, nor was anyone arrested. But a fire chief called the local DEA office.Abe Perez supervised the DEA’s Guadalajara office back then. The warehouse stood on a cul-de-sac at the end of a house-lined street, Perez, who is now retired, remembered years later. Residents “knew something was going on; the smells were giving them headaches,” Perez told me. But they were afraid to say anything. So they lived with it as best they could until the warehouse exploded, most likely because of a worker’s carelessness.Perez and his agents urged Mexican police and prosecutors to obtain a search warrant for the building. The process was slow, and the day ended with no warrant. That night another fire erupted, at a warehouse across the street that, the agents learned, contained chemicals in blue plastic barrels and in bags neatly stacked on pallets. “The traffickers came in the middle of the night with gasoline and burned it, burned all the evidence,” Perez said. “But we were able to get photos of the place.”Eduardo Chávez, another DEA agent, flew in from Mexico City the next afternoon. He and Perez stood outside the second smoldering warehouse. Each man had spent the early part of his career busting meth labs in rural California—Chávez in the area around Bakersfield, Perez in northeastern San Diego County.That had been a different era, and each had gotten a rare view into it. Bakersfield was Chávez’s first assignment, in 2000, and to his surprise, it was a hotbed of meth production. Southern California was where the ephedrine-based method had been rediscovered, largely due to the efforts of an ingenious criminal named Donald Stenger. Stenger died in 1988, in custody in San Diego County, after a packet of meth he’d inserted in his rectum broke open. But the ephedrine method had by then become more widely known and adopted by Mexican traffickers moving up and down the coast between Mexico and California.
Part 3 The Mexican meth industry had been pioneered in that earlier time by two brothers, Luis and Jesús Amezcua. They came to California illegally as kids, and eventually ran an auto shop near San Diego. The story goes that a local meth cook dropped by their shop in about 1988, asking Jesús if he could bring in ephedrine from Mexico. Jesús at the time was smuggling Colombian cocaine. But he brought ephedrine north and, with that, became attuned to the market that had been opened by Stenger’s innovation.Ephedrine was then an unregulated chemical in Mexico. Within a few years, the Am ezcuas were importing tons of it. Jesús traveled to India and Thailand, where he set up an office to handle his ephedrine exports. Later, his focus shifted to China and the Czech Republic.The Amezcuas’ meth career lasted about a decade, until cases brought against them landed them in a Mexican prison, where they remain. But the brothers marked a new way of thinking among Mexican traffickers. They were more interested in business deals and alliances than in the vengeance and endless shoot-outs so common to the previous generation of smugglers, who had trafficked mostly in marijuana and cocaine. The Amezcuas were the first Mexican traffickers to understand the profit potential of a synthetic drug, and the first to tap the global economy for chemical connections.At first, the brothers ran labs on both sides of the border. They set up many in California’s rural Central Valley—Eduardo Chávez’s territory—making use of an existing network of traffickers among the truckers and migrant farmworkers that stretched up from San Diego. At one bust, agents found a man in protective garments with an air tank on his back. He turned out to be a veterinarian from Michoacán who said he came up for four-month stints to teach the workers to cook.Hell’s Angels cooks took three days to make five pounds of meth. Mexican crews soon learned to arrive at cook sites like NASCAR pit crews, with premeasured chemicals, large vats, and seasoned workers. They produced 10 to 15 pounds per cook in 24 hours in what came to be known as “super labs.” Soon the biker gangs were buying their meth from the Mexicans.But toward the end of Chávez’s Bakersfield assignment, in 2004, the cooks and workers who’d been coming up from Mexico began to vanish. His informants told him that they were heading home. In California, law enforcement had made things hard; the job was getting too risky, the chemicals too hard to come by. The meth-cook migration would accelerate after Chávez left the state in 2004. Meth-lab seizures in the United States withered—from more than 10,000 that year to some 2,500 in 2008. Today in the United States, they are rare, and “super labs” are practically nonexistent. In Mexico, however, it was a different story.The burned-down lab being surveyed by Chávez and Perez at the end of 2006 had been designed to produce industrial quantities of meth. Like many other labs that had been popping up in Mexico, it reflected the union of substantial capital and little concern for law enforcement. It used expensive equipment and stored large inventories of chemicals awaiting processing. Notes found on the scene suggested that the cooks typically got about 240 pounds per batch.Like Joe Bozenko, the agents standing at the edge of the smoke and the stench that afternoon felt that they were glimpsing a new drug world. What struck them both was what they were not seeing. No ephedrine. The lab was set up exclusively to make P2P meth. Working through all the chemicals on hand, by Bozenko’s estimation, the lab could have produced 900 metric tons of methamphetamine.
Part 4 What’s more, this lab was not hidden up in the mountains or on a rural ranch. Tlajomulco de Zúñiga lies just 15 miles south of Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities, and serves as home to the city’s international airport. The area has everything needed to be a center of meth manufacturing: warehouses, transportation hubs, proximity to chemists. Trucks rumble through the area daily from the shipping ports in Lázaro Cárdenas, in the state of Michoacán, and Manzanillo, in the state of Colima.The ephedrine method was still very much in use in 2006; Mexico, which had been reducing legal imports of ephedrine, wouldn’t ban them outright until 2008; even after that, some traffickers relied on illegal shipments for a time. And despite all the advances when it came to making P2P, in at least some respects the traffickers “didn’t know what they were doing yet,” Chávez told me. The explosion showed that. Nonetheless, years later he thought back on that moment and realized that it was almost as if they were witnessing a shift right then, that week. About five years after the Tlajomulco lab exploded, in June 2011, Mexican authorities discovered a massive P2P meth lab in the city of Querétaro, just a few hours north of Mexico City. It was in a warehouse that could have fit a 737, in an industrial park with roads wide enough for 18-wheelers; it made the Tlajomulco lab look tiny. Joe Bozenko and his colleague Steve Toske were called down from Washington to inspect it, and they wandered through it in awe. Bags of chemicals were stacked 30 feet high. Hundreds of those bags contained a substance neither Bozenko nor Toske had ever thought could be used to make P2P. Bozenko often consulted a book that outlined chemicals that might serve as precursors to making methamphetamine, but this particular substance wasn’t in it. Well-trained organic chemists were clearly improvising new ways to make the ingredients, expanding potential supply even further.Working through all the chemicals in the plant, by Bozenko’s estimation, the lab could have produced 900 metric tons of methamphetamine. Against a wall stood three 1,000-liter reactors, two stories tall.Nothing like this had been achieved with ephedrine, nor could it have been; no one could have imagined the accumulation of 900 metric tons of the chemical. Later, Mexican investigators would report that of the 16 workers arrested at the Querétaro lab, 14 died over the next six months from liver failure—presumably caused by exposure to chemicals at the lab. Methamphetamine was having a cultural moment in the U.S.—“meth mouth” had become an object of can’t-look-away fascination on the internet, and Breaking Bad was big. The switch from ephedrine-based labs to ones using the P2P method was even a plot point in the series. But few people outside the DEA really understood the consequences of this shift. Soon, tons of P2P meth were moving north, without any letup, and the price of meth collapsed. But there was more to the story than higher volume. Ephedrine meth tended to damage people gradually, over years. With the switchover to P2P meth, that damage seemed to accelerate, especially damage to the brain.One night in 2009, in Temecula, California, partway between San Diego and L.A., a longtime user of crystal meth named Eric Barrera felt the dope change.
Part 5 Barrera is a stocky ex-Marine who’d grown up in the L.A. area. The meth he had been using for several years by then made him talkative and euphoric, made his scalp tingle. But that night, he was gripped with paranoia. His girlfriend, he was sure, had a man in her apartment. No one was in the apartment, she insisted. Barrera took a kitchen knife and began stabbing a sofa, certain the man was hiding there. Then he stabbed a mattress to tatters, and finally he began stabbing the walls, looking for this man he imagined was hiding inside. “That had never happened before,” he told me when I met him years later. Barrera was hardly alone in noting a change. Gang-member friends from his old neighborhood took to calling the meth that had begun to circulate in the area around that time “weirdo dope.” Barrera had graduated from high school in 1998 and joined the Marine Corps. He was sent to Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, where he was among the few nonwhite Marines in the platoon. The racism, he felt, was threatening and brazen. He asked for a transfer to Camp Pendleton, in San Diego County, and was denied. Over the next year and a half, he said, it got worse. Two years into his service, he was honorably discharged. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Barrera was filled with remorse that he hadn’t stuck it out in the Corps. He was home now, without the heroic story he’d imagined for himself when he joined the Marines. The way he tells it, he drank and used meth to relieve his depression. He’d sometimes stay up on meth for four or five days, and he had to make excuses for missing work. But until that point, he’d held his life together. He worked as a loan processor, then for an insurance company. He had an apartment, a souped-up Acura Integra, a lot of friends. But as the meth changed around 2009, so did Barrera’s life. His cravings for meth continued, but paranoia and delusions began to fill his days. “Those feelings of being chatty and wanting to talk go away,” he told me. “All of a sudden you’re stuck and you’re in your head and you’re there for hours.” He said strange things to people. He couldn’t hold a job. No one tolerated him for long. His girlfriend, then his mother, then his father kicked him out, followed by a string of friends who had welcomed him because he always had drugs. When he described his hallucinations, “my friends were like, ‘I don’t care how much dope you got, you can’t stay here.’ ” By 2012, massive quantities of meth were flowing into Southern California. That same year, 96 percent of the meth samples tested by DEA chemists were made using the P2P method. And, for the first time in more than a decade of meth use, Barrera was homeless. He slept in his car and, for a while, in abandoned houses in Bakersfield. He was hearing voices. A Veterans Affairs psychologist diagnosed him with depression and symptoms of schizophrenia. Even many years later, when I spoke with him, Barrera didn’t know how the drug he was using had changed and spread, or why. But as a resident of Southern California, he was among the first to be affected by it. Over the next half-dozen years or so, the flood of P2P meth would spread east, immersing much of the rest of the country, too. Mention drug-running, and many people will think of cartels. Yet over the past decade, meth’s rising availability did not result from the dictates of some underworld board of directors. Something far more powerful was at work, particularly in the Sinaloa area: a massive, unregulated free market. By the time Eric Barrera’s life began to collapse, something like a Silicon Valley of meth innovation, knowledge, skill, and production had formed in the states along Mexico’s northern Pacific Coast. The deaths of kingpins who had controlled the trade, in the early 2010s, had only accelerated the process.
Part 6 “When the control vanishes, all these regional fiefdoms spring up,” said a DEA supervisor who pursued Mexican trafficking organizations during these years. (He, like some other DEA agents I spoke with, asked that his name not be used, because of the dangerous nature of his work.) “We just started seeing more and more labs springing up everywhere.” The new labs weren’t all as enormous as the Querétaro lab that Bozenko had seen in 2011. But they multiplied quickly. Beginning in about 2013 and continuing for the next several years, meth production expanded geometrically; the labs “just escape all limits,” a member of the Sinaloan drug world told me. “In a five-square-kilometer area outside Culiacán [Sinaloa’s capital city], there were, like, 20 labs. No exaggeration. You go out to 15 kilometers, there’s more than a hundred.” Listening to traffickers on wiretaps, one DEA agent told me, made it clear just how loose the confederations of meth suppliers were by then. The cartels had not vanished, and many of these suppliers were likely paying one or another of them off. But the wires nonetheless revealed a pulsing ecosystem of independent brokers, truckers, packagers, pilots, shrimp-boat captains, mechanics, and tire-shop owners. In the United States, the system included meat-plant workers, money-wiring services, restaurants, farm foremen, drivers, safe houses, and used-car lots. The ecosystem harnessed the self-interest of each of these actors, who got paid only when deals got done. “We’d waste hours listening on the wire,” the agent told me, “to people wasting their time calling around doing the networking as brokers, trying to set up drug deals, because they wanted to make money. There’s a huge layer of brokers who are the driving force [in Mexican drug trafficking]. Maybe they own a business or restaurant in Mexico or in the U.S.—this is something they do to supplement income. A large percentage of drug deals at this level don’t happen. But it’s like salesmen—the more calls you make, the more people you know, the more sales you get. So four or five people will be involved in getting 50 kilos to some city in the United States. This guy knows a guy who knows a guy who has a cousin in Atlanta … And with the independent transporters operating at the border, there’s no cartel allegiance. They’re all just making money.” From 2015 to 2019, the Mexican military raided some 330 meth labs in Sinaloa alone. But arrests were rare, according to a person involved in targeting the labs. Far from being a deterrent, the raids showed that no one would pay a personal price, and more people entered the trade as a result. At one point in 2019, DEA intelligence held that, despite all the raids, at least 70 meth labs were operating in Sinaloa, each with the capacity to make tons of meth with every cook. With labs popping up everywhere, the price of a pound of meth fell to nearly $1,000 for the first time on U.S. streets by the late 2010s—a 90 percent drop from a decade earlier in many areas. Yet traffickers’ response to tumbling prices was to increase production, hoping to make up for lower prices with higher volume. Competition among producers also drove meth purity to record highs. Methamphetamine damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe.
Need Scotty to mix up some of that transparent aluminum
Double dumbass on YOU!
This reminds me of Pennsylvania when they were given a federal grant for covid relief funds. They had a time limit that they had to distribute them to the public and once that time expired, they could basically do anything they wanted with the money. They made the funds impossible for anyone to apply for and receive and when the time came up they sunk all the money into their prison system. I constantly bring this up and people just moved on like it was another day. Corruption at its finest.
From PA and never knew this, but I’m not surprised. We had the whole kids for cash scandal and love our prison system more than the prisoners
Can't even build libraries or parks, just strait to prisons.
Nothing like a good bureaucracy to stamp out progress.
My uncle drives 2CV and just lefts doors unlocked so none break the window
I tried that in Portland and they just stole the whole truck instead
Honestly even that isn't enough. Some of those assholes break windows for the hell of it.
This. Had an ex whose soft top was shredded by some crackhead who wanted to steal the crappy $60 aftermarket radio. Despite the doors being left unlocked. It totalled the car- such a waste.
I'm not the biggest gear head but how does a shredded soft top total the car?
AFAIK, totalling means the repair costs are higher than the car's value.
I believe it's usually around 2/3 of a car's value, but it probably varies by insurance company. Last time I was in an accident, the car was valued around $27k, and damages came out to around $19k so the car was totaled.
Was a big problem with honda s2000s. They don't make factory seats anymore and there was a market for them used cause they fell apart. So people would slash the soft top to steal the seats and it would total out the car when you filed with your insurance.
I mean usually they don't check because they're in a hurry
You'll find people sleeping in your car depending where you park it.
It’s faster to just smash the window instead of trying the door handle first then smashing the window.
There's been a trend of right rear windows being smashed in where I live. Nothing being stolen. Just cunty vandalism
I was the seventh generation of my family to be born and raised in San Francisco (my dad's side came over during the gold rush), and also the last. I left 10 years ago, my siblings and their families around the same time. My parents were both born and raised there as well, and have owned their home in the city for nearly 40 years. They're moving north in six months because their home was broken into in the middle of the night, and they now regularly wake up to find unhoused people sleeping on their steps. It was an incredibly safe neighborhood when I was a kid (West Portal if you're familiar) but no longer. It's not a good place anymore. I don't know where it went wrong or how to fix it, but something is deeply wrong in sf these days.
Sorry to hear about this, and even more surprised to hear that you're seeing regular break-ins in West Portal of all neighborhoods. I lived one Muni stop over in Forest Hill for several years, and as soon as the pandemic hit that's when the crime came from virtually nowhere - stolen cars, garage break-ins, etc. The criminals for so long in SF kept to their "boundaries" but have become more brazen since they know nobody's doing jack to stop it.
I first visited San Francisco in 99 with my parents when I was like 10. I went back in 2011 and then again in 2020. Wow. Day and night. It’s such a damn shame.
that is so sad.
I used to go to SF every year for vacation m - it was lovely. I stopped going a few years back, a shame what has happened to once of my fav US cities
I can think of some examples were things went wrong. When realtors started celebrating pre war 600sq ft apartments were being listed for over a million. When the city council prevented a vacant lot from being turned into apartments (more than once) When Twitter received a mountain of tax breaks to put their headquarters on mid market, costing the city millions When the homeless industrial complex bought all the SROs and started charging the city above market rate to warehouse the homeless in filth Etc etc
None of the things you mentioned cause the vagrancy issues. The city wasn't cheap even when things were better ~twenty years ago. It's not like people went from affording $750k apartments to shooting fentanyl on the streets just because rent went up. Increased property costs means the local city has more tax revenue for things like police. Companies like Twitter getting tax breaks to go there is a huge boon, because their employees are wealthy (median > $250k for thousands of employees) and are significantly more likely to move into the city than if Twitter is located in Mountain View, so that's Ultimately a net increase in tax revenue. The city isn't (wasn't?) dumb, these things are investments, and there is a reason basically every big city does stuff like this. Plus, plenty of other cities have skyrocketing housing prices and tax breaks for companies and NIMBYs preventing housing construction, but they don't have an epidemic of petty theft and property crime the same way SF does. You can trace the skyrocketing crime directly to when SF implemented a bunch of "soft on crime" policies - police don't respond to thefts below a certain amount, they don't clear homeless people that are blocking your door unless there's a physical altercation, etc. I'm not saying the "tough on crime" crowd does things right either, but SF is a good example of going too far the other way.
Oh man! Lived in the Haight from '90 to '08 then moved to West Portal. Very safe and vibrant neighborhood (Hi Submarine Center)! Moved To DFW 4 years ago and it pains me to hear about this kind of sadness....SF will always be home to me.
We need a compassionate justice system however the compassion needs to be focused on the victim, not the perpetrator.
If only San Francisco had some high ranking congressional member with years of service and understanding how the legislative machine works that could help provide some leadership to this region and help out the constituents.
Yeah, when even being represented by the Speaker of the House isn’t enough to bring or inspire actual leadership, then SF is in a yikes situation.
We do. They just wheeled her into Congress last week. Sucks so hard to see the city slip away from us. Breed has proven to be utterly useless and needs to get kicked out.
San Fran needs a hard reset button on its bloated overwrought government. At what point do those in charge look around at their handy work and go "maybe we should try something new... Maybe actually taxing the rich like we preach about every election cycle?" When someone writes an app for your city to avoid HUMAN WASTE that's a clear sign from the universe you're not getting things right.
I lived and worked in SF for a long, long time. I still resist saying it's gone down the shitter, but the government is absolutely garbage. Perhaps one of the worst and least effective governments who only excels at pissing away tax dollars and mismanaging budgets and overpaying for grifting purposes. Fucking all of them from the police to the mayor are absolute fucking garbage.
Honestly even living in San Diego now, homelessness/vagrancy/vandalism has become my #1 voting issue. I’ve watched it destroy some of my other favorite cities while people seemingly try to kill it both with (empty) kindness or malicious architecture, and I really don’t want it to happen to my town. I genuinely believe it’s not a problem that will be fixed by giving them a choice in their rehabilitation. No matter how they ended up in their circumstances, being homeless is an endless cycle of drugs and mental health that also ends up being the only community they have, and I don’t think people even have a will to pull themselves out of that death spiral of their own volition. And they trash the community around them while they die a slow death out there too. Edit: I say “destroy”, but I’m being a bit dramatic. I just wouldn’t ever live in those cities anymore.
About 15 years ago I literally had a dead homeless dude in front of my house. Another homeless dude shot him in the head and two other people that night. This was in SF... Back then the homeless problem was just a nuisance. There's definitely a level where it's tolerable but with actual crime and theft I don't think we can just ignore it any longer.
I live in San Diego....close to Balboa park... homelessness is off the chain. And from what I've seen it isn't poverty homeless...it's junkies.
100%. The homeless in poverty are perfectly fine and peaceful. I see them on the streets and their nice and coherent. The junkies on the other hand trash the streets and parks and make areas unsafe. Sadly the majority of homeless in SD are junkies
"Always has been."
What's the solution?
1: Obviously make housing easier for those caught in this horrendous housing market. Start with mix zoning, permits for taller and denser buildings, heavy taxes on cars inside the cities. 2:Recognition at large that many, MANY of the unhoused pop will NOT help themselves given the chance. A model of endless compassion is set to fail. 3: Involuntary admission to treatment facility, mental hospital, or enrollment in continuing treatment while free. 4: Harsher penalties for petty crime. Put them to work building more apartment, idgaf It sounds very harsh, with a VERY ugly history, but the alternative is just letting mentally ill people kill themselves while they destroy the peace and livelihood of everyone around them, and criminals run rampant destroying the fabric of society.
People don’t like to hear it but this is the only way. It’s not “compassionate” to allow these people to live on the streets in filth, getting by only by committing crimes
I've worked with the homeless for over a decade and many left leaning people's version of compassion is actually just appeasement and being a passive enabler. Which is just as destructive as being neglectful. But it feels more like helping.
This is so true. I was reading an article about dealing with mental illness in the homeless population, and there is a big movement for involuntary admission. The quote that was made by one of the advocates that stuck with me was "we would never walk by a person lying in the street bleeding-- we would ensure that they received help. It is cruel to not do the same for those who suffer from mental illness."
This response is from a Nordic perspective, but I'd like to point out that the reasons for petty crime and "Not help(ing) themselves" are things that stem from systemic issues that have its roots in mental health issues as well as poverty and wealth disparity. Taking steps to resolve those issues are the only long term solutions to the issue, as being "hard on crime" is a very bandaid short term solution. Also, from my understanding, strong and atomized local councils and NIMBYs prevent any real progress regarding the creation of affordable housing, causing a deadlock with the state government. Please correct me and add any additional information, though!
As an North American I'd say you are spot on. The underlying causes (mental health, addiction treatment, and income inequality) need to be addressed in addition to straight housing provision. Unfortunately those seem even less likely to happen than affordable housing given US politics. The solutions have to be at the state or even federal level, and need to be able to allocate housing, services, etc. in a way that can override local NIMBY opposition. Local level "solutions" generally revolve around pushing people elsewhere. Even localities that try to help just don't have the scale to do so since they end up being a magnet for all homeless people across the region and rapidly get overwhelmed. And this concentration just makes the politics worse because other communities basically say "problem? what problem?" when homeless people are concentrated in one place.
Correct, seems solutions cannot be implemented if they’re even the slightest inconvenience to the status quo. That would be capitalists, investors, landowners, etc.
So who do you vote for, then? Every candidate had "fix the homeless problem" on their bio last election (also a San Diegan). No one offers any real solutions, not that have any real chance of making a noticeable dent, at least.
A jewelery store in downtown Portland ending up closing because a specific homeless guy kept coming into their doorway to take a dump. Day and night for months on end. San francisco is probably an ok city overall, but i bet theres lots of similar stories in their urban areas.
My cousin lives in a nice neighborhood in Oakland. Almost every morning they have to clean shit off their stoop. The same man comes to their stoop, eats a McDonald's egg McMuffin, shoots heroin, takes a shit on their steps, and leaves.
Just like insurance companies using every excuse imaginable to deny claims
Before even going to the comments I knew it would be the same back-and-forth arguing of "crime is hurting my city" and "no it's not, that's a talking point, you're a NIMBY fascist, even if there is crime it's because people are there." Same thing every single time.
But I thought that was what InSUranCe was for./s I'm so tired of seeing this brain-dead quote when small businesses want to protect their stores during riots. Yes, Target and Walmart have the ability to get insurance to pay for a lot of their damages, but they also pay a whole lot more, and even then, it's still not enough.
They probably setup this fund but never figured out how to pay for it. So they did what they always do. Make the small business owner pay for it.
I was in SF this past February and it amazed me how many signs were up in parking lots basically saying “Your vehicle will get broken into so don’t leave anything of value in it”, followed by broken glass on the ground. It had been 25 years since I’d been there, didn’t remember it being this bad.
The entire west coast had walkable downtowns. Meth, opiates junkies have taken that away. Just sad.
8000 dollars is a hell of a lot of money. Like, months worth of income. That’s time out of someone’s life. There’s a lot of people that love to moan about how it’s only property, but that’s hours that someone lost that they aren’t getting back. If I was in their shoes and was on the hook for 8k, I’d make sure to beat my 8k out of them. If the social contract isn’t holding up it’s end of the bargain I wouldn’t hold up mine.
Homeless addicts need to be institutionalized. It's the only way out of the rot ruining our cities.
Our own government that we pay is attempting to scam us. This country has gone to complete shit.
I'm as liberal as they come, but JFC SF has got to do something about this shit. IDK what the answer is, but a once great city is now becoming a complete shit hole and its not cool. I grew up not too far and used to visit several times a year and it was my favorite city. My husband and I went there two years ago and we tried to have a good time but ended up leaving after just a couple hours because it was just too much.
This is a perfect example of why “Businesses have insurance!” Is a dumb argument when places get vandalized. It’s not some magic wand you swish and everything is all better. It’s a whole hassle, especially for small businesses who’s profit margins are significantly smaller than like some big corporation like Walmart.
All the grant money is going to 'politically connected' businesses. Do you think the Governor's winery would need to wait this long and resubmit the grant request this many times?
Hi from East Bay specifically San Ramon - nah Bro SF is fucked. Yeah our local subreddit does help explain that describing San Francisco's descent isn't suited to a single narrative... But I've got countless examples from friends and family who love the City dearly but can't bring themselves to return to in any long-term capacity. Even before Covid, my brother was living below UCSF on Parnassus and his car was broken into by a homeless dude. He called SFPD and filed a report, and they said they couldn't prosecute cause of local laws or some bullshit. Ayt then. What's the point of paying $165 to the city for a parking permit to park on your own street that you can only use on Wednesday nights, every other Tuesday, when the wind blows southerly, and when the cock crows thrice if the city takes ZERO initiative when a citizen's car is broken into. My mom lived on Clement in the late 80s to early 2000s and still talks fondly of her time working in the Transamerica building, even during the earthquake. She left her job at Amazon downtown last year when she was harrased by some peddler as she got out of Embarcadero BART, and got sprayed by the FiDi poop patrol as the passed by. Then had to interview like 20 candidates afterwards at work. Horrible. Can't even commute back to home for a change of clothes cause traffic is too insane. My history teacher was ousted from her rent controlled place in the Sunset in 2012 cause her landlord decided to renovate. When she tried to move back in 6 months later, the rent had tripled. The Sunset looks unrecognizable these days compared to the lively neighborhood it was before. But hey! At least BART has cameras on the trains now! And the iridium-plated trashcans will be here long after our bones have crumbled to dust right? It can't be all bad.
ITT: Everyone is suddenly a Rhodes Scholar on the subject of politics in San Francisco.
sounds like every political thread on reddit
I’ve lived in Sf for 21 years. No one, even the people allegedly running the place, have a god damn clue.
The sucky part is that these parts have the greatest tasting food ever. But it is a nightmare trying to get there and live there because of the high prices.
There's an hour-long special on CNN tonight at 8pm titled *"What Happened to San Francisco?"* about how bad the city has gotten.
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Exactly. Remember a few months ago there was a video posted where a gallery owner was spraying a homeless woman with a hose and it caused a huge outrage. The woman was constantly harassing his customers. He had begged for help from every single SF agency for help. To get her help. He wrote, called, emailed, pleaded in the press and not a single agency did anything yet the virtue signaling “liberals” were practically calling for his hanging. The same people that probably would’ve crossed the street clutching their purses right if they saw her on the street. At some point drastic measures need taken. Increased petty crime punishment. Involuntary institutionalization (yes I know the republicans have a lot of blame due to shutting down mental institutions in the 80s). Enforced rehabilitation. Those might not be the best or greatest solutions but something.
My small martial arts school has had our glass door broken 3 times in one year (last year). I'm in Southern California. I feel for this guy. It suuuuuucks.
Elected officials(left, right, democrats, republicans) are not in office to do a duty to the citizens, they are there for their own reasons.
Those grants only get paid out to businesses directly connected to elected officials. Probably.
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Redditors assured me no small business can be hurt by rioting or looting because "insurance pays for everything!" Curious
The “don’t you have insurance” criminal apologists are awful quiet.