My parents were charged with this soon after coming to the US - they brought a bottle of wine to a barbecue at a public park; the bottle wasn't even kept in view, but presumably some busybody still noticed and called the police.

if you are drinking from a bag, an officer must look into the bag to know you are drinking alcohol. looking into the bag requires probable cause and a 4th amendment protected search.

But yeah, SF handles homeless issues poorly and spends a tremendous amount of money doing it. And you don't have to be a "get those people out of my sight and that's all I care about them" kind of person to think that SF has been doing a bad job.

What I am ultimately trying to say is that the large majority of people on this forum see the symptom of a broken society (homelessness and drug addiction) and for whatever reason, refuse to believe that a complex network of problems is actually the thing that should draw our 'hacker' focus.

Like sure, you clearly had a negative experience with permitting that caused you to have an expensive fine and feel resentment that other people do 'worse' things 'scot-free'.

Would fining a homeless person more money actually solve your or the city's problems? No. The person would just not pay, because again, they have nothing to lose.

Ultimately, I think where we agree is that the idea of law needs to evolve to include both punishment and state funded / enforced humanitarian care.

The reason that I think this will never happen in America is because we are an inherently vengeful people with a dark history of race-based hatred and a fundamental disdain for paying taxes that fund public goods.

I agree with the statement if you mean that you should be punished more for the latter than for the former. But if you mean that you should be punished less for X and someone else should be punished more for Y (where Y is a greater crime than X), there simply are not enough details to know if I agree. I might think that you should be punished more when you are in a position to profit from the actions and therefore be more willing to continue despite the punishment (e.g. a restaurant owner refusing to make up the minimum wage difference for a server who didn't make enough in tips) whereas the other person committed their crime from opportunism in a desperate situation (e.g. a homeless person who robbed an unfortunate individual for money, including causing some minor injuries). If the same person were to commit both crimes, obviously the latter is worse; if different people commit the crimes, I'd be interested to know more about the perpetrators if I was asked to pass judgement.

> The complaint is that laws are structured in a way that only affect people who have something material to lose.

This is how it should be. Society should be structured such that every member of it has something material to lose.

The only answer I've found is that one should define the rules strictly enough for people to make sense of them in advance. They should either be easy to find in context or be few enough to learn.

The obligations seem:

1) Document the issue at hand accurately and keep it up to date.

2) Write out the laws in a strict way that leaves as little room for interpretation as possible and keep it up to date.

3) Make sure those affected know what the laws are wasting as little of their time, money and effort as possible.

We seem surprisingly incompetent at 3. We should also be able to make the variables dynamic so that the thing updates it self.