It's next to impossible to give everyone their own home in large cities so we have to think about building homes in the outskirts of cities and ban people from living in the common areas of our cities.
Los Angeles is spending millions to house people in hotels. Spending that much tax money can't continue forever not to mention the fact that it's not fixing the problem. Living alone in your own home where ever you want is not something the taxpayers can or will fund forever. We need to make some hard decisions and it's not providing a forever home for everyone that wants to live alone.
Los Angeles has a budget of $43 Billion. Their current budget for homelessness is $1.3 billion. Typically the cost to have people on the streets is significantly higher than simply housing them due to Law Enforcement and Emergency medical costs alone. Los Angeles can certainly afford to house them for as long as necessary. In fact it can't afford NOT to.
That said, I'm still all for housing them in permanent buildings. With steel bars.
How about some "hard decisions" for people who aren't, e.g. people who can, all by themselves, afford thousands of private homes forever?
I don't see any reasonable way to interpret this comment
the plain and simple fact is that as automation and outsourcing continue, jobs will move toward being completely managerial in nature, and only a small group of people at the top will have jobs. the space between now and UBI will be tons of homeless and disenfranchised.
someone who becomes homeless due to addiction is not likely to be supported by their family because people, in general, hate addicts. even well-off families often can't or won't afford to pay for the help the addict needs, or the addict needs more help than can be afforded, and eventually the family is likely to get sick of it and the addict is again homeless.
you might believe that these aren't the case, and I can't convince you, but the traditional family support network barely exists now and usually doesn't accomplish much when it does exist.
"There's really no way to solve homelessness without seriously addressing this," says Kushel, the UCSF researcher. "Otherwise, we're going to be compelled to continue to spend huge amounts of money managing an increasingly out of control crisis."
Judging from the comments so far, there seems to be a lot of emotion involved in them. I haven't read the first work by Marx, but my sense is his work had a thread of anger running through it.
In Plato's Republic, the tripartite soul(Greek "psyche") consists of the appetitive part (compared to a multi-headed beast), a spirited, honor-loving part associated with the emotion of anger (compared to a lion), and the rational part (compared to a human being). It depicts the soul dominated by the appetitive part being like an ape or monkey. To use the same line of thought, I think Marx's soul may have been dominated by the spirited part, which could be compared to a manticore (a beast with the body of a lion and the face of a human). Capitalism, on the other hand, is dominated by the appetitive part.
Also it's pointed out in the Republic that unlimited acquisition of wealth results in wars (due to needing more land/resources) and health problems (due to overindulgence).
I could say more, and I know my comment is somewhat unfocused, but if you keep ignoring the foundations of these issues, you're not going to be able to fix the problem.
Remember in A Christmas Carol (yes, I know Charles Dickens didn't "walk on water"), how the Spirit of Christmas Present showed Scrooge the two children, Want and Ignorance? I see a generation of un- or under-educated children coming up that has been given a bill they never could have or would have agreed to. How do you think they must feel? What should they do?
The sad reality is that the difference between the folks you pass by on the street and you is often just a little bit of bad luck and no support system.
Go listen to interviews with the folks that live in the sewers in Vegas, most of them want to work but can't get a government ID because they've had their old Ids and birth certificates stolen a long time ago.
I met a woman in her 60s in Oakland who was homeless and worked three (part-time) jobs. Couldn't afford to rent even the cheapest of apartments, couldn't work her way out of debt, was unmarried and had no living relatives.
Ol' Uncle Sam tends to not take kindly to those that can't pay to play.
1. https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homeles....
Listen to men who beat their wives, all of them had it coming.
People say what they think you want to hear. Don't take it at face value.
Specifically for this case: Whenever someone tells you how many jobs they work vs how many hours it's because it isn't that many hours.
- SAMHSA, 2019
Its a miracle anyone of the libertarian priest caste is still alive to discuss this. Back in French king times, when a system failed it's people thoroughly, the mob roughing it in the streets would put the upper echelons on a wagon to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_de_la_Nation. The American citoyens are extremely docile, even going through the proper democratic channels with righteous anger.
It is, however, very much against too much repetition of the same few topics, and this is probably one of those.
I've read the guidelines many times. The second paragraph seems to indicate this post would be off-topic.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
2009
Posts: 10950 Sites: 1129 Submitters: 1440
Class Stories Votes (mean) Comments (mean)
UNCLASSIFIED: 3741 3741 1.00 3741 1.00
blog: 1930 1930 1.00 1930 1.00
n/a: 1734 43045 24.82 45495 26.24
tech news: 1118 1118 1.00 1118 1.00
general news: 878 878 1.00 878 1.00
corporate comm.: 450 450 1.00 450 1.00
business news: 407 407 1.00 407 1.00
academic / science: 337 337 1.00 337 1.00
programming: 316 316 1.00 316 1.00
general interest: 124 124 1.00 124 1.00
software: 90 90 1.00 90 1.00
Posts: 10950 Sites: 1158 Submitters: 1398
Class Stories Votes (mean) Comments (mean)
UNCLASSIFIED: 4844 4844 1.00 4844 1.00
programming: 1146 1146 1.00 1146 1.00
blog: 1123 1123 1.00 1123 1.00
n/a: 864 167707 194.11 125736 145.53
academic / science: 567 567 1.00 567 1.00
general news: 444 444 1.00 444 1.00
corporate comm.: 406 406 1.00 406 1.00
tech news: 400 400 1.00 400 1.00
social media: 252 252 1.00 252 1.00
general interest: 222 222 1.00 222 1.00
- The "(mean)" columns have bad data, I need to fix my code. The others should be reasonable.
- "UNCLASSIFIED" are sites I've not manually classified. They tend to follow roughly the same overall distribution, though more blogs and fewer news sources.
- "n/a" are posts without a site, typically an "Ask", "Tell", "Who's Hiring", or similar post.
Keep in mind that even "general news" is often about science, technology, or tech-adjacent business, legislation, court decisions, etc.
(I was counting "stories" as both "votes" and "comments", which is obvious on eyeballing the values. The difference between "++" and "+= votes / += comments". Sigh.)
Actual / corrected data:
2009
Posts: 10,950 Sites: 1,129 Submitters: 1,440
Class Stories Votes (mean) Comments (mean)
UNCLASSIFIED: 3741 208521 55.74 90426 24.17
blog: 1930 121329 62.86 53561 27.75
n/a: 1734 84356 48.65 89256 51.47
tech news: 1118 58870 52.66 29115 26.04
general news: 878 41661 47.45 25054 28.54
corporate comm.: 450 30740 68.31 13541 30.09
business news: 407 20064 49.30 11748 28.86
academic / science: 337 16806 49.87 6951 20.63
programming: 316 19170 60.66 7820 24.75
general interest: 124 7081 57.10 3370 27.18
Posts: 10,950 Sites: 1,158 Submitters: 1,398
Class Stories Votes (mean) Comments (mean)
UNCLASSIFIED: 4844 1440894 297.46 767619 158.47
programming: 1146 308222 268.95 117139 102.22
blog: 1123 322989 287.61 202251 180.10
n/a: 864 334550 387.21 250608 290.06
academic / science: 567 130608 230.35 73908 130.35
general news: 444 158965 358.03 154772 348.59
corporate comm.: 406 144991 357.12 85870 211.50
tech news: 400 122049 305.12 92895 232.24
social media: 252 124105 492.48 87830 348.53
general interest: 222 53305 240.11 47007 211.74https://www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/Ending...
Evidence points to what the original poster said. It may seem counter intuitive but well, solutions often are.
Someone else said, "if hard work correlates to success, there'd be many millionaire African women.". But many successful people discount that they've had luck, e.g. the luck of being born in a rich country/to rich parents.
But speaking of reason - it certainly has its limits. If reason is ignored, it may well eventually succumb to anger.
There's a fat but fuzzy area in the Venn diagram where these things overlap - for example some stories are both intellectually interesting and have a political dimension. Those stories, or at least some of them, can still be on topic for HN. Opinions inevitably differ about which ones belong vs. which ones should be excluded.
Lots of past explanation about how we think about this, if you or anyone is interested, can be found here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
The feeling that HN has changed significantly in recent months or even recent years is often due to random (or maybe seasonal) fluctuations. It usually reverts back. For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.