Engineer Converts Used Van into Mobile Laundromat, Offers Free Loads to Homeless

>The money is spent very efficiently

Doesn't the fact that there are systemic causes at the root of a problem means that trimming the branches is not an efficient manner of resolving the issue?

Note that I am asking this as someone who spends more than 1/2 of my life "trimming the branches."

Obviously, the way that government deals with systemic issues is highly flawed, but that is all tied up in the systemic issues that need to be resolved right?

Yup, yup. We in the USA have plenty of room and plenty of money, and we are a very generous and giving people overall, but we also often display a vindictive attitude toward our poor. We act like they are getting away with something when they live in tents and defecate on the sidewalk.

Millions of people are unhappy at their jobs. If one could just "drop out", stop working, and be provided a decent home, enough food, and medical care some percentage of those unhappy workers would do it. People with homes and jobs actually resent homeless people, which, if you think about it, is a really weird reaction to have, eh?

I'm a Bucky Fuller fan since childhood, so I've talked to a lot of people about using technology to set up a kind of utopia (economic, not political) where everyone's basic needs are met, and often folks ask, "But who would pick up the garbage?"

There's a lot to unpack there. But the underlying assumption is clear: without the threat of destitution and vagrancy no one would do the unpopular or unpleasant jobs.

I could go on, I could cite Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents"[0], or talk about the Indian Wars et. al. and the tension between the New World and Old World cultures, the stigma attached to "going native", and the hideous efforts to remake indigenous people in the image of the colonist. Or we could talk about how mainstream culture tends to revile the "hippy", the "dropout" who just wants to be at peace and live in harmony with Nature.

Long story, really, but yeah, the bottom line is that we have the technology to make a kind of secular economic utopia nearly overnight, and our problems now are mostly psychological or social.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Disconten...

> Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts.

  > the advantage of having an efficient government that does good work is people can simply throw their money at it and assume that things will be taken care of

We have the government we have. It is far from efficient, and I'm not sure how it could be more efficient at solving this particular problem since what we're really trying to "solve" is the outcome of a number of problems that took place in that person's life. Those are going to be related, sometimes, to things unique to that area which will not be solved easily from hundreds of miles away.

Unfortunately, what usually occurs is this large, resource-heavy (financially both directly and indirectly) organization becomes a really attractive target for people wanting to do things other than "help the homeless". And I'm not really picking entirely on government here. There are some very large charities that have made the mistake of attempting to centrally manage these sorts of assistance programs. It doesn't work as well as moving that money to local organizations that are already demonstrating their effectiveness.

  > Imagine if government health inspectors didn't exist and you had to rely on Yelp reviews and word of mouth to decide if a restaurant was clean enough to eat at.

I sort-of laughed at this -- I've made the opposite argument time and again. How many times have I visited Yelp before "eating adventurously" because I have zero trust[0] in the effectiveness of a government health inspector to keep me safe. Yes, they check a lot of stuff -- much of it meaningless, and it's as good as department involved, the inspector and the things they check (where I live, that can really vary, and where my family has a home, the restaurant owner was the mayor, the chief of police[0]). On the flip side, Yelp reviews have been incredibly reliable at me avoiding bad food, dirty restaurants/bathrooms and -- I suspect -- food sickness.

To be clear: I'm not saying taking away government inspections wouldn't result in things being worse than they are, today. I'm simply saying that given the choice between the two, I'd feel safer in a world with Yelp and no government inspections than the other way around[1]. I don't have data to back it up, and I'm one of those people that always looks up a place before we eat (my wife usually beats me too it, though). The "fun" stories I used to hear from my high-on locker partner about how he "got that large arm bandage" cooking at Ram's Horn... you don't want to know.

Outside of restaurants, I would trust a large number of positive reviews (assuming appropriate context) for a hair stylist who is unlicensed (hypothetically, since I've never really paid any attention to the funny looking document hanging by the mirror -- I assume I've never visited an unlicensed stylist, but I can't be certain) over a stylist with a license and no reviews.

There's a whole lot of services I'd be willing to ditch the government side for commercial options that didn't exist when the government option was created. I don't believe there's an adequate replacement for credentialing for doctors/surgeons, but -- even in those scenarios, if I have a choice, I'm going to research the hell out of that doctor -- the government-only solutions are helpful, but they're part of a broader set of data -- much of which are not/can't realistically be provided from the government source.

  > ... taxable income ...

... it must have been very late at night and considering I just went through this, recently, I shouldn't have had such a large brain-fart. And yes, you must itemize. Where I live, that's extremely common (though, less so since the last tax code changes). Renting is rare because it is usually less -- on purely monthly mortgage payments -- to own. Most will choose to have more money in their pocket every month, especially if it comes with something they can sell later. Even as a deduction, though, you can have a warm and fuzzy feeling that you've slightly reduced the amount of money you pay to things you don't support (assuming you don't support the vast majority of what the government spends your money on).

[0] And had tens of visible violations -- one of which wagged its tail, looked longingly at me and occasionally left a foul-smelling gift. We loved the place, were never sick, and we ate there twice most weekends for three summers (as did many local celebrities, which was one of the reasons we loved the place).

[1] I've put a little though to this one over the years ... Family who owned restaurants/personal/friends/family experience in food service. I have a sibling who was a C-Level exec at the company who's logo is on all of the equipment in the kitchen (I've even seen it on flatware) at practically every legally operating restaurant in the US (look at the soft drink machine for three letters in a circle -- they're one of those weird ubiquitous logos, like UL, that once pointed out, you see everywhere)

It sounds like your community's affordable-housing problem is fighting the ravages of nature and entropy to build and maintain habitable structures. That is certainly not easy or cheap, but there is an amount of money that it costs, and it's theoretically possible for resources to be abundant enough that everyone clears the floor.

In San Francisco there is no changing the numbers of people who can and can't get housing. Affordable housing work can only mess with their identities.

  > It sounds like your community's affordable-housing problem is fighting the ravages of nature and entropy to build and maintain habitable structures.

Welcome to Detroit[0]. $20,000 can get you a huge old house in an unsafe neighborhood with an outstanding liability to the water department. The area I live costs about $225,000 for 1,500 sq. ft. in a nice, zero-crime, residential neighborhood.

Back when I was doing this frequently, the work was mostly centered around making homes livable/saleable that had problems the home-owners couldn't deal with (many, many cancer patients with weakened immune systems who couldn't live at home due to environmental toxins). We never touched the dangerous stuff, but after the folks in HAZMAT suits clear out, you're going to be hanging a lot of drywall, at a minimum. Often houses with these kinds of problems had several others that weren't found until the obvious problems were removed.

Reading over my responses, I'm a little disappointed at how frustrated some of them sound. While I am frustrated at folks who choose to complain rather than doing something. There's this thinking that "If I complain, then I'm putting myself outside of the group that's 'causing' the problem"...meanwhile the sentence often ends with "...in America!", where the person complaining is often located.

And, frankly, where I live -- charity, and government dollars would be better spent elsewhere.

[0] Like most who are "from Detroit", I live outside the city limits.