And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

Honestly this isn't the right conversation to be having at all.

In the United States, ~40% of the homeless are employed. A deeply non-trivial percent either are kids or have kids. Everyone should volunteer at a support center for homeless youth some time.

Sure, there may be some kind of Pareto principal in play for the hardest 20% of cases to crack. Who cares? Let's eliminate 80% of the existing problem and worry about the rest when we get there.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the median HN reader has very little appreciation of the human reality of homelessness in the United States, and primarily see it through the lens of people at the extreme, visible margins. I know I used to until I got involved.

edit: I mean all of this in a very boring, matter of fact way, not some kind of holier-than-thou virtue signaling way. The 80% problem of homelessness is a tractable economic problem. While it's true that the United States has an almost dizzying level of propaganda demonizing poor people, it's also true that real homelessness is hard to spot because people have a natural instinct to preserve their and their family's dignity. The first time I came to terms with this was coaching debate in highschool. I had a varsity debater who couldn't afford pants to meet the dress code. Incredibly bright, academically successful kid. His father was an unemployed teacher working menial jobs, his mother was taking care of three kids. They lived in a tent at campsites. I had absolutely no idea. We obviously bought him pants and paid all his travel/etc. fees (he'd been making excuses to not go to events requiring travel). That's a very boring, normal case.

That family should have had a free or nearly free housing option. They did not. They still wouldn't.

This kind of reminds me of how health care organizations were are are using non-opt out emailing which are suppose to be used only for alert related stuff to perform targeted marketing. As a Kaiser patient I received target vaccination emails with subjects lines like "Get vaccinated for flu to protect yourself for the holidays " during COVID. And its still going on afterwards.

I reached out to their communication department and they had a rep call me to get more information about the emails. She tried to frame it as information only emails but the messaging was clear, that were marketing vaccinations during the holidays and giving no way to opt out of it. I never heard back from them.

Now we have corporations like AirBnb and Etsy sending you emails requesting reviews with no way of opting out of those communications. I had to close my accounts. I cant do that with my health provide, but you see where this is going. There is an effort to send communications without giving people a choice.

I think one of the reasons is that it depends on the day and time you post things. I have seen submissions get nothing and the end of the day and have a better in the afternoon. And weekends seems like mornings are better.

Some homeless people choose to not make use of such facilities, for example because they don’t want to get into fights with the other (ex-)homeless living there, or because of anxiety issues and the like.

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing.

I was taught as a child that most people deep down genuinely want to be "good people". If only I had known what an absolute lie that really truly was, I'd have chosen a very different path for my life. Going out of my way to be a "good person" to the best of my ability was a total waste of a life that could have been spent in the pursuit of wealth and power, which I would have been very good at, had I not foolishly chosen to adhere to a "moral code" that was based on fantasy and naivety and a "reality" that just didn't exist as it was taught in schools, churches, and homes.