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Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

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Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#241

Post by dabockster »

thatoneuser wrote: post #196
driverdan wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you applying for jobs? Are you spraying and praying or are you going to meetups and such to network and get recommendations? Cold resumes won't get nearly as far as a recommendation. Have you applied to remote jobs? Contract jobs? Looked for freelance work?

I'll be real, it sounds like you're giving the generic "I just Googled how to get a job" advice and in my personal experience - this kind of advice rarely accomplishes anything and leaves you more distraught than before.

>I just Googled how to get a job

It’s worse than that. It reads like something a LinkedIn “influencer” who hasn’t had to actively look for a job in 30 years would write.

Here’s some insights from my current job search:

>Meetups I live 45 minutes away from Seattle. On a good day, it’s a 1.5 hour round trip commute. With Seattle traffic factored in, it can balloon to 3-4 hours round trip. The last two meetups I did go to were full of boot camp students and very few actual employed devs. (Side note, only one of the five boot camps that were there had the WA state technical school accdredidation.) The Meetup talks were glorified sales pitches for B2B AI analytics products (with one company admitting that its AI was actually third world upwork contractors in an news interview a week later).

>Remote work Not in a position to negotiate that unless you mean 1099 freelance work. 1099 is a hardship since I’d have to basically set up my own business at that point. (I will never do a sole proprietorship since the personal risk is too high if the business fails or I get sued for something.)

>contact and freelance jobs Did you read what I just said?

Anyways, I’m logging off HN again and working on my blog. I really need to block this site since all I see here anymore are innane comments like these.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#242

Post by diogenescynic »

karles wrote: post #231
wybiral wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Austin, Texas I encounter homeless people regularly and have become a bit numb to the stories after talking to people more and seeing their stories change. I've bought food and even pumped gas into portable gas cans for people, refusing to give them any cash, only to see their story unravel when they realize they won't get money from me. The original story about needing gas to pick up their paycheck morphs in…

I don't think giving them money should be about "getting people back on track" or anything similar. It's just to give them money for a beer, a burger or something to ease their day. Personally, I think there will always be people who doesn't fit into society. It's easier if we don't expect them to open a savings account with the 20 bucks we gave them, and just realize that it goes towards getting drunk/getting someth…

How is that compassion though? “Here’s $20, go kill yourself somewhere out of my sight. I don’t care.” Is the worst kind of indifference and apathy to drug addiction and mental illness I’ve ever seen. If it was your family member wouldn’t you want better? It just seems like someone has to look out for people who are just self-harming themselves openly in public. Giving them a couple bucks to go away so we can go on with our life and pat ourselves on the back like we helped them is just apathy. Cops need to arrest the meth and heroin dealers but they don’t do anything. It should be appalling but it’s become normalized.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#243

Post by diogenescynic »

xtracto wrote: post #232
justboxing wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. This was literally nuts. Nevada bused in and dumped over 50 mentally ill patients onto the streets of San Francisco, and the consequence was that you couldn't walk in downtown San Francisco without encountering 1 of these patients acting crazy on the streets. It's somewhat lame that the City settled for a measly compensation of 400K. They should've all been rounded up and send back to Nevada, to the hospital…

Ohhh so that's why SF downtown is unbearable! As an international tourist there I hated my stay in San Francisco because of the amount of crazy people in the street. I am ok with homeless and poor people, but having to dodge a crazy guy almost doubling my size throwing punches in the air is not a pleasant tourist experience. Or being robbed of my water bottle while I waited my wife just outside Sephora. It was scary…

Nevada didn’t help, but the homeless they sent are a drop in the bucket. 50 extra homeless isn’t super noticeable since there are lready 8000+. The real problem is decades of lack of enforcement of trespassing laws, letting people go to the bathroom in the street, and openly use drugs in public places. This has all led to a downward spiral.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#244

Post by Fellshard »

grogenaut wrote: post #235
trashcan wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe that when someone is slowly dying of addiction on the streets, that it might be more compassionate to help them cure that addiction, even if it is against their will (not like you normally get to decide you don't want to go to jail when you've comitted a crime anyway). I know it's not a one size fits all solution by any means, and has the potential for tons of liberty infringing issues, but it sounds bet…

The goal of Safe injection sites are specifically aimed at getting people care while letting them deal with their addictions, under monitoring. Whether they'll work here in the us or if we'll let them is a different question. They worked where the idea came from. That's what gp didn't like. What do you think since you seem to want a better option. Is that better than jail as a default? It's supposed to do what you wa…

Do you have evidence they worked, short or long-term? Are there any substantive differences between the two programs?

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#245

Post by driverdan »

dabockster wrote: post #241
thatoneuser wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be real, it sounds like you're giving the generic "I just Googled how to get a job" advice and in my personal experience - this kind of advice rarely accomplishes anything and leaves you more distraught than before.

>I just Googled how to get a job It’s worse than that. It reads like something a LinkedIn “influencer” who hasn’t had to actively look for a job in 30 years would write. Here’s some insights from my current job search: >Meetups I live 45 minutes away from Seattle. On a good day, it’s a 1.5 hour round trip commute. With Seattle traffic factored in, it can balloon to 3-4 hours round trip. The last two meetups I did go…

Sorry if I came of condescending, that wasn't my intention. I was trying understand the situation in case there was something I could do to help.

>Remote work Not in a position to negotiate that

There are many remote jobs available now. Check out https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#job-board... for a list of boards that show remote jobs. Remote work isn't for everyone but it opens up a much wider selection if you're having trouble finding something local.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#246

Post by grogenaut »

Fellshard wrote: post #244
grogenaut wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of Safe injection sites are specifically aimed at getting people care while letting them deal with their addictions, under monitoring. Whether they'll work here in the us or if we'll let them is a different question. They worked where the idea came from. That's what gp didn't like. What do you think since you seem to want a better option. Is that better than jail as a default? It's supposed to do what you wa…

Do you have evidence they worked, short or long-term? Are there any substantive differences between the two programs?

I'm not a policy wonk. Research them and make your own opinion. Portugal and another country have tried them. Portugal to amazing success. Turns out many people wanted off the drugs and just needed help is the summary I saw there.

I think we do have data on how well the current system works.

The two programs being what? I know Seattle is having a lot of troubles even implementing them well due to stigmas so I don't know if we even have finished.

I do anecdotally know one of my hyper liberal teacher friends was against them on the east side as she associated heroin use with only downtown Seattle homeless. When I pointed out they were more likely to use the center downtown instead of a 2 hr bus ride and the ones on the east side were for all the people you hear about being hooked on oxygen... She actually started thinking about it instead of just reacting. It's a hard sell with a lot of stigma and fud around it.

It's not my goal to argue you one way or another in a post like this. It's my goal that you actually make an informed decision instead of an uninformed one off of anecdotal data.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#247

Post by Data_Junkie »

karles wrote: post #231
wybiral wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Austin, Texas I encounter homeless people regularly and have become a bit numb to the stories after talking to people more and seeing their stories change. I've bought food and even pumped gas into portable gas cans for people, refusing to give them any cash, only to see their story unravel when they realize they won't get money from me. The original story about needing gas to pick up their paycheck morphs in…

I don't think giving them money should be about "getting people back on track" or anything similar. It's just to give them money for a beer, a burger or something to ease their day. Personally, I think there will always be people who doesn't fit into society. It's easier if we don't expect them to open a savings account with the 20 bucks we gave them, and just realize that it goes towards getting drunk/getting someth…

The arrogance that goes into thinking one can decide what is the best use of a couple of dollars to ease someone else's pain is mind boggling. People in this society have a huge problem with believing their crappy little jobs are proof of their superior intellects.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#248

Post by Data_Junkie »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #172
dgzl wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a scam, but I'm not convinced. Between my own experiences interacting with the homeless and scammers, seeing his fresh physical wounds (including staples in his head), and the weird amount of knowledge he had about physics and obscure computer operating systems, I just don't see it. If anything, he deserves my help just for being so thorough.

Why would society want to reward people who go to great lengths to defraud others?

Have you never seen a shitty movie ? A good advertisement ? Not as much difference as you might think. This society is built upon rewarding frauds. Homeless people with engaging stories are only punished for being poor, not for fraud.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#249

Post by anongraddebt »

kevinpet wrote: post #42
anongraddebt wrote: post #11

Here is one database on homelessness in the U.S.: https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/ At least with this database, homelessness appears to have decreased over the last ten years. ---- Posting this because it isn't clear whether the "changing face of homelessness" is such that current methods for calculating homelessness are problematic or not.

It's unfortunate for this family, but as long as there are some desperately poor, you'll be able to find stories like this. If the changing face of homelessness is not actually going hungry that often, being given notice when the police are coming through to clean out the encampment, this might be an improvement over recent historical trends. I'm disappointed with the lack of data and style reporting on homelessness…

Yeah, the lack of high-quality, public databases for certain issues is unfortunate.

A couple years ago I sat in on a talk by a guy in D.C. who had led a small beltway coalition for over a decade to get data processes standardized across the largest departments within the federal government. Things they achieved, that made one think the U.S. was simply moving from being stuck in the 70's to being stuck in the 80's ,were quite clearly exciting wins for him.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#250

Post by jmspring »

newnewpdro wrote: post #219
jmspring wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but things aren't that simple in Santa Cruz. The reality is more complicated. Currently, there is an SF/Seattle style camp that has sprung up on the entrance into town. The current city council is made up of a majority that sides more with homeless uses than the concerns of others including families. The first 5 (bi weekly) city council meetings of the year have been stuck on what to do with this camp that has…

It's always complicated. > I've talked with many at a coffee shop (no longer open) over the last half dozen years. The Perg I presume? I spent many days working from that place with my car parked for free in the adjacent now-pay parking lot. Santa Cruz has changed a lot in the last ~6 years. I used to visit regularly from SF, practically every week, when there was still free parking downtown with The Perg and LOGOS u…

They marked an end, but on the other end, the enablement of the tweaked out and mentally unstable with catch and release policies also marked an end.

The city is in a spiral of it's own creation - lax policies and pretty lax enforcement of violent crime and "hard" drug use (coupled with county policies of no services and releasing them back into the community) are pushing people away from the commercial areas. Residential areas are gentrifying, yes, but with people that are busy somewhere else most of the week (or potentially second homes).

At the same time, a vocal minority is insisting, as I mentioned, on solving all the worlds problems without any expectation of rule of law, decency, etc.

This isn't sustainable.

However, it has engendered a significant non-profit industry base that work towards "solving homeless issues", but there is a lot of overhead, overlap, and little consensus on how to move forward. When there is a request for accountability (for renewal of funding), nearly all of them scream bloody murder because that means rules for them.

It's not a healthy community.

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