Live data from Hacker News

We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

bbc.co.uk

151–160 of 300 posts

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#151

[flagged]

Nordic countries have essentially eradicated homelessness by allowing the government to take an active interest in fixing the underlying issues that cause it. As a citizen, I don't want the burden of having to fix homelessness, that's what I pay taxes for.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#152

> The homeless centre told them Ronnie needed an address to get a job, Rob said, but "to get an address, you need a job". > "That's the Catch 22 that loads of homeless people are in." Breaking this systemic barrier would make life easier on a lot of people.

I wonder why they require it?

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#153
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy Christmas, folks! > please have some humanity about the homeless In the US, the homeless population exploded , in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas. Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have…

Non-neurotypicals can receive bad treatment from neurotypicals. But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant. The corollary of not knowing when they're offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance - which is actually a lot; although it's understandable that this is not obvious.

I'm more cynical. I think most people really are intolerant. They have their culture which they perhaps unconsciously equate with being good or morally right and anyone who doesn't follow the complex unwritten rules is shunned or abused. Those rules may be mostly good but nobody questions them all, yet almost everybody either enforces them or tacitly tolerates their friends enforcing them. This is probably necessary because if everyone went around inventing their own standards for behavior, people wouldn't get along very well and the outcome of "most people get along with each other most of the time" is itself valuable - it just comes at the cost of those who can't understand it. I think most people can't comprehend the possibility that somebody who seems reasonably normal and intelligent doesn't understand the rules so they must be acting maliciously and deserve punishment.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy Christmas, folks! > please have some humanity about the homeless In the US, the homeless population exploded , in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas. Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have…

> when they closed down all the mental institutions. Why on earth did we do this? I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm. I know there were abuses, but we have cameras now. And that's surely better than leaving them on the streets to freeze to death. I can't imagine it would cost…

>I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm

I'm reading this comment as if you had written:

"The TV show Hogan's Heroes makes being a prisoner of war sound like a jolly good time."

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#155
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the reaction is actually knee jerk/automatic before the upper brain(?)/concious tolerant/empathetic side can take control, is someone a jerk for having that primal response first. I consider myself very tolerant and empathetic and I do my damndest to be that way, but my wife says sometimes it’s not the first thing that shows. I’m trying as hard as I know how. Should I be condemned?

> Should I be condemned? You shouldn't be condemned, but as I wrote, people should stop the hypocrisy and virtue signalling of pretending to be so insanely tolerant if they have such a primal response.

If they didn’t have a negative response, it wouldn’t be tolerance, by definition. Tolerance means engaging with something you have a negative response to.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#156

Beautiful story but with a sad undertone. A large percentage of the homeless have autism [1]. And that really sucks. If these people don't have support, their lives can turn miserable fast. And unfortunately it's just way too easy for these people to end up in abusive situations. It's a lot of work to care for people with autism (moderate to severe). There is no standard for what they need, their capabilities can be…

Happy Christmas, folks! > please have some humanity about the homeless In the US, the homeless population exploded , in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas. Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have…

Around the same time, much of the US also stopped building housing at the rate needed.

I'm pretty sure there would be far less homeless if there were a lot more homes around.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#157
post #122

When you read this story - your heart warms & your eyes gets filled. It is crazy nice feeling. You feel like this world is such a better place. Yet, it hurts - to know there are so many homeless that our system needs corrections.

It also reminds me that systems can’t fix situations like this. The system of “care,” as the story alludes to the autistic person experiencing in their youth, often looks a lot more like warehousing the people on the margins of society, often in unpleasant (and almost always in institutional) conditions. Some kinds of humanity can only ever happen person-to-person, and it’s a great treasure for everyone involved to e…

Yep, we are part of the system.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#158
post #5

My parents once took a struggling man in. I think he stayed with them for about three years, up until the moment I was conceived and my mom started planning for a future for our family and helped him get into a housing project. For all of my life before adulthood this man would show up once in a while on his racing bike for coffee, talk and proceed to stay for dinner. He was kind, funny and a tidbit strange. His life…

You could always ask the police to see if they anything about. Or Hire a detective if you want closure.

Re: We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

#159
post #52

[flagged]

IDK about ya'll but the ~25-30% (or whatever) I pay in taxes/SS/medicare isn't going to be a significant enough bump to enable me to eliminate homelessness... Where we can actually take the government out of the equation and actually help people: Zoning. In places without governments like Haiti you can raise a family in a relatively simple structure. It's not ideal but it's how humans have been not-homeless for the e…

> In places without governments like Haiti you can raise a family in a relatively simple structure

have you actually tried living in Haiti? Bonus points for being born and living past 4 years old. Even more points for living on median wage.

Eliminating homeless isn't that expensive. The UK did it during covid, it cost like 700million. Thats not like a partial thing. _everyone_ had a room to stay in and 3 meals a day. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

It could be made significantly cheaper if government had social housing to spare (you know like actually build them again)

Post reply on HN