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Life During Class Wartime

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Re: Life During Class Wartime

#181

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

webdood90 wrote: post #84
wrqvrwvq wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on t…

Why do people stan for billionaires? I don't get it - what motivates you to say this stuff? Most of what you said is greatly exaggerated or simply not true. It's like you cherry picked Fox News talking points.

You're on a site created by a VC fund for startups and startup employees and you are surprised that its inhabitants are in favor of wealth accumulation and capitalism? Don't shoot the messenger; I'm just pointing out the obvious.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#182

Post by FireBeyond »

jakefromstatecs wrote: post #159
FireBeyond wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the challenges here as an ex-paramedic in the PNW who has certainly seen their fair share of homeless is that several of the more prominent studies use HUD's definition of "severe mental illness" that is far more conservative than you or I would expect... "Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, on multiple occasions in a year". And that number, per HUD, is 22%. If you want to look at "untreated ment…

> If you want to look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%. But "untreated mental illness" isn't the same as "mental illness that requires institutionalization" which is what the OP is saying. Additionally, a lot of mental illnesses can be reasonably managed with proper medication, and in my mind very, very few actually require institutionalization. But we as a country can't even get be…

That's true, and it blows my mind that that's the first or even high on the list of "ways we can help with this".

I do think there's a Venn diagram around severely mentally ill and untreated mentally ill that might require more intensive care. There's also the complexity that drug use and abuse is a method to cope with the emotional pain of homelessness (as one of my instructors said, "if my existence was reduced to fishing rained-on food out of trash, brushing cigarette ash off of it, sleeping and shitting in alleyways, often without something to effectively wipe with, you better believe I'd be on a fast path to taking some drugs to numb that"), or for "self-medication" of said untreated mental illness.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#183

Post by JuniperMesos »

BryantD wrote: post #110
JuniperMesos wrote: post #95

> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless. I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in we…

Even if it’s true that most unhoused people are mentally ill — and I agree with Tim’s reply — you have must consider causation versus correlation. Is an unhoused person dysfunctional because they were always that way and thus doomed to lose shelter, or are they dysfunctional because living on the streets is extremely damaging? You see this question a lot when discussing drug usage among homeless. The percentages of a…

I hear a lot of accounts of relatively-normal people who talk about one member of their family who is homeless and living on the streets because they stopped letting that family member live with them because they did things like violently attack children in their home, or steal money in order to buy drugs. So this makes me think that a lot of visibly homeless people were in fact dysfunctional before they became homeless.

And this is relevant for any institution at all that tries to house such people, including the state. If the state provides some kind of basic housing with electricity, what happens when the people living there rip wires out of the wall so they can sell the scrap for drug money (a major reason why most landlords don't want to rent to really poor people)? Will someone prevent them from doing that (i.e. institutionalization), or will the state itself evict that person from their housing and allow them to live as a homeless street person?

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#184

Post by [deleted] »

lovich wrote: post #179
tomhow wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041608 and marked it off topic. Not cool. Other users were perfectly able to respond to the parent with curious conversation. I'm not going to respond any further publicly. You can email us if you want to discuss further.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#185

Post by JuniperMesos »

kasey_junk wrote: post #156
XorNot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US despite everything still runs a popular vote driven democracy that is clearly capable of implementing on short notice, sweeping changes to policy. The problem remains that the US voter consistently demonstrates they don't actually care about these problems though, compared to using the state to intentionally inflict misery on subgroups they don't like. The most radical thing the current administration proves i…

I think this administration truly puts paid to the idea that billionaires control the US. Trump was _broke_ now he’s making billionaires the world over kiss the ring. This happened because he’s consistently harnessed the power of the popular vote. Just today he flexed that muscle in Indiana. I’m distraught that my fellow Americans keep falling for his circus barking and he’s made it clear that norms don’t matter and…

Trump was never actually broke, but his popularity comes from the fact that he took a bunch of public political stances that his political opponents refused to take because they genuinely thought those stances were immoral; and then won elections based on those stances because a lot of the electorate also liked them.

There isn't actually one monolithic class of billionaires that all share the same interests and want the same things; and even though an individual billionaire can be personally influential, they simply do not have the power to unilaterally determine the political direction of a country. But regardless of what political direction a country does go in, there's probably some billionaire who is more or less aligned with that direction. So anyone who dislikes that political direction can point to the nearest-ideologically-aligned billionaire and blame them for influencing politics in that way, despite the fact that if the tables were turned and their side was winning, someone else would point to whatever billionaire aligned with them as an evil influencer.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#186

Post by nullocator »

inglor_cz wrote: post #70
gazebo2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that state action is the direct result of wealth's influence over the state and how it operates

Two of the three (housing and education) don't seem to be caused by that. Neither restrictive zoning, nor the administrative bloat in academia that caused tuition to skyrocket, were lobbied into existence by people like Bezos and Musk. They are result of tireless lobbying of relatively unimportant people seeking their own little rent.

Aren't most of the housing issues in this country NIMBYism and zoning? NIMBYism lead by vocal, wealthy property owners? Zoning controlled by governments lead and captured by wealthy and corporate interests?

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#187

Post by nullocator »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #49
idle_zealot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally you'd spend the taxes on things that help people, but I would argue that even simply destroying the taxed wealth would be an improvement over what we have now, if only in that it would counter wealth/power disparity and enable democracy to work better. Allowing a subset of the population to accumulate power divorces their interests from the majority and represents the biggest threat to modern society. It woul…

> destroying the taxed wealth Wealth is farms, factories, skills, etc. How would destroying all that improve anyone's life? Wealth isn't money. It exists independent of any currency you can use to give it notional value.

I don't think I can personally farm a Yacht into existence, so not sure that holds water. Over the last several years the "value" of several of my skills has basically gone to zero as technology advanced, so I'm not sure that I buy in the modern era at least skills are a good indicator of wealth either, nor can I likely acquire a Yacht with pure skill alone.

I guess if I am a factory owner I could produce a Yacht, but as a humble employee I'd be unlikely to experience or enjoy the produced Yacht's of the factory, and it also seems like the factory owner would sell most of their produced Yacht's for money, not "farms, factories, skills"

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#188

Post by BrenBarn »

nullocator wrote: post #186
inglor_cz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two of the three (housing and education) don't seem to be caused by that. Neither restrictive zoning, nor the administrative bloat in academia that caused tuition to skyrocket, were lobbied into existence by people like Bezos and Musk. They are result of tireless lobbying of relatively unimportant people seeking their own little rent.

Aren't most of the housing issues in this country NIMBYism and zoning? NIMBYism lead by vocal, wealthy property owners? Zoning controlled by governments lead and captured by wealthy and corporate interests?

Many of the NIMBY property owners are not nearly wealthy enough to be affected by most wealth tax proposals (e.g., the "few tens of millions" suggested in the article).

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#189

Post by ethanwillis »

tomhow wrote: post #172
ethanwillis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you’re trying to make the case that “sometimes violence is the only answer”, please stop. It’s the responsibility of thoughtful people in a civilized society to find ways of solving problems, even very large and deep ones, without violence. As soon as we think “there’s no alternative other than violence”, we need to think harder. All the worst atrocities in history happened because enough people allowed themselves…

[flagged]

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#190

Post by BrenBarn »

tantaman wrote: post #26

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

We don't need to use the tax on government bureaucracy. We can just give it right back out as direct payments to the non-wealthy.
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