81–90 of 261 posts
This has little to do with the homeless and everything to do with a society that's shifted from seeking to facilitate positive things (e.g. the comfort of some random person on some random occasion) to one that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people. This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and th…
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Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness! Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.
Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?
Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness! Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.
SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
I believe expensive housing is at the root of many societal problems, it's not even funny. We don't have park benches because we've adopted hostile architecture to keep out "undesirables". This mostly means "homeless people". But why are there so many homeless people? The primary reason is housing unaffordability [1]. One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the t…
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Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?
This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained.
We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces.
The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.
> it is apparently the consensus And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice. In reality, the peop…
While not ideal you gotta admit now that those people that need help are in your face rather than conveniently disappeared you are thinking about their plight some.
Maybe try to think of something better than forever prisons and stop becoming a ghoul.
I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.
> it is apparently the consensus And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice. In reality, the peop…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?
I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social. This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained. We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?
I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social. This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained. We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?
I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social. This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained. We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to…